


Life-Sound

by savemeaplate



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval Fantasy, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Bottom Lance, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Finger Sucking, First Time, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Lance is half dragon half faerie, M/M, Prince Keith (Voltron), Prince Lance (Voltron), Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Swordfighting, aaaand a whole lotta fucking, curly haired lance, lots of medieval-era shenanigans, oh and thick lance hehe, sharing a horse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:34:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 72,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28395438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savemeaplate/pseuds/savemeaplate
Summary: The Belí are a hybrid race: half dragon, half faerie, and wholly arrogant. Once impossible for Prince Keith's kingdom to defeat, they are now the country's tentative ally.The core agreement of their truce is this: each kingdom will send a young person of royal blood to the other kingdom, to spend five years learning the customs and ways of each place.A Belí named Lance comes this year, cold-eyed and lovely. And in full possession of the calamity that Belí so often bring, no doubt.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 49
Kudos: 404
Collections: Just some pretty nice fics, favorites





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> baby's first slow-burn! here are some additional warnings (there definitely some ***spoilers here, but these are important):
> 
> \- there are some pretty graphic descriptions of violence towards the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2 (tread lightly)   
> \- grief/mourning: keith loses both of his parents, and lance has also lost his; talks about death and grieving  
> \- my hand slipped and i gave lance a liiiiitle bit of a non-con kink (nothing non-con happens in the story, but lance does mention it when they're about to fuck in the second chapter)
> 
> also, im on [twitter!](https://twitter.com/guardameunplato)

This is the second time Prince Keith has ever seen a Belí wear pants. 

In the textbook renderings Keith sees week-to-week during his history lessons, they are always nude, with sharp faces so beautiful they are unsettling.

In these etchings groups of naked Belí stand at the base of their mountains with bows across their backs and sneers pulling their full lips into stand-offish tilts. They look almost feral, far wilder than even their dragon blood would suggest. They are forever caught, on the pages of these texts, mid-argument with their Fae relatives. Their arms and legs are tattooed in coiling patterns that look like whirlpools. 

This Belí rides through the palace gates on a glossy black palfrey, preceded by the Arusian ambassador Coran on his own horse. Keith watches from his standing position at the edge of the palace fountain, beside his sister Romelle in full regalia, as the Belí pulls the horse back into an effortless trot. Keith, his sister, and his parents are standing straight across from the palace gates. Keith watches the entourage come down the wide, perfect cobblestone path. 

The long, long cobblestone path.

This might take a while. 

Keith has heard that the Belí can fly like wingless dragons, and has to wonder if this one is considering taking flight to shorten the needlessly long procession. You wouldn’t be able to tell from his general demeanor though. He is the picture of patience. His face is smooth as a marble, skin the deep brown of raw amber. He has a full head of hair that is darker than his skin but not quite black, and every curl (for there are many) seems meticulously placed. 

He is not smiling, but his expression is not unkind. His head is tilted towards Kolivan, the commander of the King’s Guard, who is riding his own large gray gelding. Kolivan seems to be explaining something to him, and the Belí gives him a slow nod. For all that he is flanked by the Aursian King’s Guard in chainmail—Kolivan on one side and Antok on the other, while the two other Guards surround him—he looks comfortable, two clicks away from pompous. 

This tradition, this exchange, has been carried out for fifty years, since the end of the Last War between the humans and the Belí. 

While the other mystical beings—Fae, dragons, forest spirits, and elves—surrendered to the much stronger Arusian kingdom when it began to expand northward, (and the dragons even left the continent altogether, weary of the fighting; the last reported sighting was over two hundred years ago; some bestiaries even presume them extinct) the Belí never did. They are a hybrid race, born from unions between Fae and dragons (though these pairings never happen anymore, and all existing Belí are the result of hybrids laying with other hybrids). 

This Belí’s arrival comes as something of a surprise. There has been news of civil unrest in the Belitian country Ekrim. Keith fully expects his parents to lay the pleasantries on thick for two reasons: to make up for the fact that even after several decades of this exchange many outside (and even within) the Arusian nobility find the Belí disturbing—a compound of the unnatural. And to signal to the Belitian nobility that this, this alliance between heads of state, is safe even in the midst of the brewing turmoil in Ekrim. 

Queen Krolia told Keith, Romelle, and Shiro about this Belí’s impending arrival several weeks ago. Shiro was preparing to leave for his temporary (though mandatory) command of the standing troops at Feyiv, a duty expected of every Arusian crown prince. The command has been entirely ceremonial since the end of the Last War, but it is significant all the same.

“Now is the time to stand firm in this union,” Queen Krolia told them. “If the minds of our two countries are in lock-step agreement, the respective bodies will follow suit. Masses bow to power.” 

Usually each young person leaves their home with a complete retinue of servants and personal guards. When Shiro left he took Keith’s favorite sword-fighting teacher and Keith’s favorite chef, so Keith was out of proper blade practice, feeding subpar strawberry tarts to Romelle’s puppies under the dinner table until Shiro got back. Keith still has a scar on his ankle from when one of the puppies bit him after he didn’t keep the tarts coming fast enough. But Shiro  _ had  _ given Keith his favorite watch (and he has yet to ask for it back), so there’s that.

This Belí comes alone. 

He’s closer now, eyes forward. When Keith catches the Belí’s eye color it disturbs him, like having someone wake you up in the middle of the night with a bucket of ice water to the face, then having that same someone hit you in the teeth with the pail.

The Belí’s eyes are so light a blue they’re almost white. Arusian academics have mostly removed the Belí from their bestiaries as a sign of respect (the other defeated mystical creatures are still in them, ironically enough). But in some of the more ancient texts their forms are described as “humanoid.” This Belí’s eyes almost flash like lightning and Keith wants to grit his teeth from the discomfort. Yeah, heavy on the  _ -oid _ .

In some ways, Keith thinks that the few Fae he’s seen, when they come to the palace for meetings, are more human-looking in appearance despite their pointed ears. Their faces are round and open, eyes either deep brown or green. Completely devoid of the angular, imperious edges of Belitian features. And the other mystical creatures can be forgiven their strange physical attributes simply by virtue of being so far removed from normal human physiognomy that comparison becomes pointless:

Dragons are enormous, scaled, fire-breathing beasts. Adult forest spirits are as small as human children when they take their tangible forms (which they hardly ever do). And even the shortest elves tend to course in at around six feet tall, average heights hover at about seven feet, and the tallest can approach nine feet. 

The Belí are the closest to human size and shape. Keith finds it all the more disquieting. They are almost familiar and all the more dangerous for that, like the cruel, too-powerful doppelgängers of regular townspeople in Arusian children’s stories. 

Their mother had told him and Romelle the Belí’s name, of course, but Keith had had his nose buried in an edition of  _ Baku’s Complete History of Herbs and Potions  _ at the time. Keith doesn’t remember what it was. Something too flowery by half, he’s sure. Something to go along with the Belí’s general appearance. Keith sees now that his face is unreasonably lovely, even among a people for whom beauty is standard. It makes Keith’s distrust absolute. 

The Belí is wearing pants, yes, but not any that Keith’s ever seen on royalty. They are loose, simple tan linen, paired with a white linen tunic Keith has only ever seen fanatical members of the Marmora Order wear when they are cursing the Arusian royal family’s spiritual weakness, evidenced by their surrender to the “vicious, bone-slurping Belí horde” (before the general palace guards beat them back with the butt of their spears). It’s a point of such absurd irony that Keith wants to laugh. 

He sees a hint of the tattoos on the back of this Belí’s hands as he holds the reins of his palfrey, just a bit of the coiling ink where it trails along some of the veins there. They almost look like cracks, a clay vase left too long on a kiln, a vanity mirror under a fist. They’re unnerving. 

Keith’s younger sister, Princess Romelle, elbows him in the ribs.

“Ow!”

“You’re slouching like you don’t need that spine for later.”

He grumbles, but straightens his posture. His father and mother, King Samson and Queen Krolia, stand before their two children in their ceremonial robes, rich rose-crimson, the color of their house. They are lined with gold thread. 

The whole procession stops before Keith and his family just a few paces away. Coran dismounts and everyone else follows suit. Though most people stand at least a head below Kolivan, the Belí is a bit taller than Keith had expected. Keith only clears him by two inches or so.

Coran bows instead of kneeling. Former Arusian kings have always expected their subjects, regardless of rank, to prostrate themselves before the King and Queen. Keith’s father is different. He doesn’t see the need for the show of submission, when all subjects of the crown should show their loyalty through concrete action—serving their mandatory military service on the border between Ekrim (Belí country) and the Arusian frontier city Feyiv regardless of gender, paying their taxes at the rates specified—not performance. Bowing was the compromise that he’d reached with his council, after they’d finally given in to his stubbornness.

“Your Grace,” Coran says, “I am pleased to present to you Prince Estilucero of the Belí, the Great Archer Champion of Northern Taujeer, Third of His Name, Sixth in Line for the Belitian Throne.”

“Rise,” says Krolia. She is smiling beautifully when she takes the Belí’s hands and says,

“Welcome to Arus, Prince Estilucero. You will be treated with the utmost hospitality during your stay here.” 

The Belí smiles back, and though Keith knows it’s not true he half expects a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. But they are blunt, and so white they nearly dazzle.

“You are too kind, Your Grace,” the Belí says. 

They’ve had Belí at the palace before but Keith hardly remembers their voices. It jars Keith to hear this one speak, clefts apart the endless silence of history book pages. It is the voice of a bard, deeper than expected and soothing besides.

“But all friends of my people call me Lance,” the Belí says.

Keith’s father laughs warmly, like Keith has heard him laugh with the peasant children downtown. The same chuckles that emerge as the royal party passes through the Commons on their way to their hunting trips, shared with the kids who whirl about the horses barefoot. Sometimes King Samson even helps one or two of the little children onto his horse to ride a ways before he eventually has to let them down to proceed with the excursion. They’ll giggle and squeal at this new game, faces dirt-streaked. Councilwoman Sanda will roll her eyes and thumb at her nose with a silk handkerchief as if the children’s grime has carried through the air to her. King Samson never cares. 

“Very well then, Lance,” Keith’s father says, clapping the Belí on the back like he does Shiro. Though the Belí is considerably slighter than Shiro (most men are), he does not flinch. 

“Our home is yours,” King Samson tells him, pulling him into a lung-busting hug that the Belí also takes in stride. That’s probably what Kolivan had been telling Lance as they came up the walkway—that Samson is an affectionate king.

The Belí’s gaze lands on Keith, and that dimpled smile he’d had flickers for just a moment. Keith scowls at the ice-chip eyes, how quickly the friendliness leaves his face. 

Romelle is vibrating with excitement next to him.

↡

The Belí were born in the days before humans crossed the Frozen Sea in the far north and made a home of this land. These creatures have the super agility, magical acumen, and shrewd cleverness of their fae forebearers, and the endurance, near-indestructibility, and terrifying wrath of their dragon ancestors. Keith has even heard, whispered by the occult scholars in the palace library, that some Belí breathe fire. 

They were impossible for Arus to defeat. The war only ended with a truce, after both sides had suffered tremendous casualties, and after Arus lost its champion Lotor to the arrow of a Belitian master archer. Arus ceded most of the Belitian land it had taken north of the Great River of Taujeer, and the Belí brought back to life the human farmland they had tactically destroyed with salt during the conflict. 

And this:

Each kingdom agreed to send a young person of royal blood to the other kingdom, to spend five years learning the customs and ways of each place. They alternate terms. Five years ago, when Keith was fifteen, his older brother Shiro, seventeen at the time, was chosen. The exchange is meant to be a gesture of good-will and growth.

The last time his family hosted a Belí, ten years ago, Keith was eleven. 

His name was Prince Luis. He had a considerable taste for juniperry malt wine (which won over King Samson) and a love for the acrobats and fire-eaters the Royal family invited to the palace for formal banquets (which won over Queen Krolia). The serving girls and boys were especially fond of him. So much so, in fact, that they’d go into his quarters to deliver bowls of fruit only to reemerge with the sliced honeydew untouched and their shirts buttoned wrong. 

Luis loved to dance at these banquets as well, and while everyone else (even Shiro) seemed to find it charming, all Keith could think about was something he’d read on the Last War, how the Belí would stand perfectly balanced on high tree branches and shoot arrows at the Arusian soldiers below, that they’d often shoot non-fatal shots at their feet in a dizzying array to make them “dance” before they pierced their panicked throats. If they were fighting in Arus, more often than not they would light the arrows aflame, so that they killed their target and destroyed the surrounding Arusian environment in the process.

It was a game to them, not a war.

How could you trust anything that played sport with pain and panic? That forced their youth, thirteen or fourteen at most, to sit for hours upon hours getting tattoos done, and ordered them not to cry? This, to Keith, is the fundamental difference between Belí and humans, and it is insurmountable: the Belí relish the harm that they cause. 

Keith never trusted Luis’s flippancy, always suspected that there was something more sinister tucked underneath. Luis’s playfulness seemed like the first step to a carefully crafted, intricate deception. When Luis had ridden through the palace gates five years ago, he’d flipped off of his horse and immediately whipped presents from his satchel, jewelry for the king and queen, gilded jack-in-the-boxes for Keith and Romelle, an emerald-encrusted sword pommel for Shiro. 

The personality and general countenance of this new one is… confusing to Keith, the reservedness so unlike what he’d expected. The civility that falls several steps short of any over-the-top effusiveness. 

They have a feast to welcome the Belí that night. 

Though not as extravagant as Luis, this prince  _ is  _ forthcoming. It’s easy for Keith to pick up on Romelle’s rapidly-developing crush (girls and boys of sixteen are never as subtle about these things as they think). Keith puts it down as something to take note of, drains the water from his goblet so he can fix his scowl into something that won’t disturb this tenuous peace they’ve cultivated with magical, dragon-descended sadists. 

Keith watches Lance ignore every meat option for every course, plate full of greens and potatoes. That’s… unexpected. Belí aren’t generally vegetarian by any measure. And from what Keith remembers Luis loved steak so much he’d probably strap the cattle to his back and cart them to slaughter himself, if that’s what it took for a prime cut.

They sit at the head of table, and it is wide enough that the King and Queen can carry on their conversation with Councilmembers Sanda and Iverson while Keith and Romelle (mostly Romelle) are tasked with entertaining their guest for now. Through the admittedly entertaining haze of listening to Regris, one of the cockier Kingsguard, “recall” the time he’d stolen an Elven longsword to go fishing with it, a bit of Romelle’s flirtatious chatter manages to reach him. 

She’s telling the Belí about the private water gardens, full of mostly orange blossom, right outside of the King and Queen’s chambers, at the heart of the castle. Melenor’s Eden, named for the first Arusian queen, a warrior who took up the offensive charge in the earliest Expansion Wars after her husband died. 

Romelle suggests that the Belí give her the pleasure of taking him on a tour through it with an impressive amount of tact. Romelle would, in truth, make quite the diplomat. Hunk, Romelle’s personal guard, looks slightly scandalized by the exchange but hides it well.

Keith is torn between a protective discomfort at the prospect of his younger sister alone with a Belí and sharp unease at the fact that the Belí now knows that there is an open-air space right below his parents’ bedroom windows. As far as Keith knows, Luis had no knowledge of the private garden. And his anxiety doesn’t lessen any when he reminds himself that Hunk is basically a second shadow to Romelle, and would never let her out of his sight.

Keith almost wants to lean over and shush Romelle, but he knows how it would look. A temperamental prince interrupting innocent, friendly consort between the princess and their (heretofore) perfectly civil ally. Keith holds his tongue, but he is listening closer now. The Belí does not explicitly take her up on her offer, declines it with pleasantries, but Keith finds a knot growing in his stomach all the same.

“Why’d you come here alone?” Romelle wants to know.

Lance gives her an easy smile, and she blushes. Keith wants to take a salad fork to his own thigh. 

“Kolivan and his guard came far too soon. If I did not naturally rise with the sun they probably would have left me too.” Romelle giggles. 

Kolivan grunts from his seat a little ways away, well within earshot,

“Impossible to please.”

Lance tilts his head, amused. “A familiar refrain.”

“Keith rises early too,” Romelle tells him, “he likes to run outside the palace before his studies every morning.”

“Oh?” Lance says, shifting his gaze to Keith, “I have heard something similar about Crown Prince Takashi. Perhaps you will soon match him in physique as well, if not in station.”

Keith narrows his eyes. Antok coughs to hide a laugh.

“I look forward to supporting my brother during his reign,” Keith replies easily, “I have no problem being the second in line. I would not be concerned even if I were the sixth.”

Lance is unphased. He cuts into his herb-roasted potato as he says absentmindedly, like he’s speaking to a servant, 

“There is a kind of certainty to being so far down the line of succession, though. No almosts.”

“I can’t thank mother enough for giving birth to me last,” Romelle says. “A kingdom is not the inheritance people think it is.”

↡

The Belí’s chambers are on the opposite wing of the palace. A solace. Keith is glad he won’t have the opportunity to cross paths with the demon archer who inexplicably rises with the sun. Keith uses his morning runs to decompress, and with how tightly wound he is after yesterday he’d honestly have to deflate like a collapsed circus tent to reach his previous levels of calm. But he’ll take what he can get. 

This Belí hasn’t even done anything yet, besides the rudeness. There is always something to look out for with them though. The Alliance is still fresh. There are still Belitian factions, the worst of whom commune with the dead and drink the blood of living things to fortify their elemental powers, who are unhappy with the agreement. They hate this tradition most of all, this exchange. 

Though the members of the Marmora Order can most often be found frothing at the mouth (in the throes of their “premonitions”) on city streets, sometimes Keith has to wonder if they don’t have a point. If Arusians aren’t tainting themselves by allowing these creatures into the royal palace when just fifty years ago a Belí shot their hero Lotor through, neck to ankle, with arrows. When just fifty years ago they’d destroyed almost all usable Arusian farmland and humans had to decide which thing would hurt the most: watching their children starve to death, or experiencing those fatal hunger pains for themselves. 

And the Order itself is not all that bad. Their leader, Haggar, established a commune for the destitute downtown. Their numbers are rapidly growing. They are, all things considered, a public good. 

But individual members’ proximity to the palace gates is not always without conflict. 

Antok always goes on these runs with Keith. Keith’s not minimizing the necessity of the guard’s presence, but his running route is so close to the palace grounds that his greatest mortal threat is the apple peddler who insists on chewing raw, hot garlic while he does his circuit. The first time the old man had bid Keith a “Good morning, My Prince!” the wind carried the smell to his face so forcefully that he stumbled and tripped into a pillar. Antok whipped out his blade with reflexes honed from years of dutiful training, fully prepared, it seemed, to cut down halitosis for his prince. Keith has mastered the careful art of holding his breath and smiling politely as the apple peddler greets him.

When Antok and Keith make it back to the gates, a few members of the Order are there. There is nothing particularly unusual about this. It breaks no laws either. Keith suspects that the guards stationed at the gates beat these men and women back with the butts of their spears for no other reason than it looks unseemly to have these loose-clothed fanatics hanging onto the golden bars. Keith has always hated it, the cold, callous indifference of guards carrying out a second-nature function, like scratching an itch on your nose. He’s never understood why his mother, father, and even Romelle—who cries for every butterfly that dies at the Glass Gardens—are perfectly fine with this. The only family member Keith has seen object is Shiro, when a guard had sent a man sprawling into the mud and Shiro had helped him up while chastising the perpetrator.

There is a man in tattered brown pants and a wrinkled, undyed night shirt grasping the bars of the gates with hands paling from the force of his grip. He is ashen, and a partial fall of greasy blond hair obscures half his face from view.

“A dragon, of bone and ash. Something worse, on its back. A dragon, of bone and ash. Something worse, on its back.”

The man’s visible eye is vacant, the hollow of an empty snow globe. His fingers are caked in dirt so black it is almost blue.

The man looks right at Keith, dry lips cracked, hands still tight around the bars.

“Something worse,” he mutters.

The guard closest to the man rolls his eyes. Keith thinks his name is Vladimir. The guards often rotate their stations from different parts of the estate, and Keith recognizes this man as one who’s frequently stationed in the throne room during mid-afternoons.

“All right, that’s enough, High Priest,” he says as he jabs him in the ribs with the butt of his spear. 

Keith feels his irritation rise. “Leave this man be—”

Before the order can clear his mouth, a few things happen.

The guard  _ does  _ drop his spear, but only because he’s forced to. The muttering man lets go of the bars and turns on him. The guard is dressed from head to toe in light chainmail, with an accompanying helmet. There are very few chinks in the armor, even though it is not what one would wear into battle. The man grips the guard’s forearm before he can react, so quick it’s startling, and scratches the dirty nails of his other hand across the soft, exposed skin of the guard’s neck. The scrapes bead red. 

All Keith sees is the muttering man, face slammed into the ground by another guard, before a couple other sentries are pushing the gate open just a bit and Antok is rushing him away. 

“You shit-fed  _ bastard _ !” Vladimir is cursing at the man on the ground. He’s still muttering.

“You  _ do  _ know I’m not a child anymore, yes?” Keith asks once they’ve entered the grounds and Antok has released him.

“With all due respect, my prince, you cannot age past death or dying.”

↡

The incident with the muttering man bothers him. 

It remains on his mind as he bathes, the ashen face slammed into dirt, the wild eyes. It is not the first time he’s ever seen an altercation between an Order member and a guard, but they’ve never been quite so… physical. He has half a mind to find his father or mother, to try and discover a better way of dealing with disruptions at the gates. One that is not so violent. But his father will be in meetings all day, and Keith has commitments of his own.

Keith’s lessons are on an alternating schedule. He and Romelle are far apart enough in age that their sessions do not overlap. He might be long past the days where he would hide behind his mother’s corsets to avoid arithmetic, but he’s always been a student of history. He usually looks forward to his Mondays and Wednesdays. 

Though as the servants are dressing him, he remembers that he will be taking lessons with the Belí. He groans so audibly that the servants begin a stuttering offer to change his shirt, before he lets them know that their selection is perfectly fine.

On sunny days like this Keith’s history and culture instructor, Dayak, opts to hold lessons on one of the marble terraces on the first floor. They are each large, comfortable open spaces right off the open breezeway that connects the east and west wings of the castle. They are each squared off by short walls of white marble, something like a huge, floor-level balcony. White lilies and hydrangeas the color of the inside of a cheek, King Samson’s favorite flower combination, line the tops of the wall. It has a perfect view of the expansive, manicured lawn.

Dayak and the Belí are already at the table, with the tomes for the day before them. There are the usual books bound in brown leather, but stacked on top lays a volume unlike any Keith’s ever seen in Arus, its cover a dark glittering blue and smooth as glass. The Belí is dressed more appropriately now, Keith notices with a mixture of satisfaction and annoyance. A long sleeved white shirt under a black double-vest with laces down the middle, and fitted breeches, not pants that could double as a sack for chicken feed. There is a phoenix in flight emblazoned in gold stitching on the chest. The seal of the Belitian royal family. 

The Belí has one of the brown Arusian history books open, and doesn’t even look up at Keith when he sits down.

“My prince, what do you know of this land before humans crossed the Frozen Sea?” Dayak asks.

Keith repeats what little he remembers from former teachers, who’d never particularly seen the utility in centering any lessons around the conditions of this land pre human migration. 

“That the creatures of this land were mostly nomadic.”

“Wrong.”

It’s not Dayak who says it. The Belí is looking at him now, pale eyes cool.

“That there was little infrastructure because there was no need, since they all relied heavily on magic.”

“Wrong.”

Keith narrows his eyes. 

“That they were as self-important and arrogant then as they are now.”

“My prince,” Dayak warns.

Lance sounds amused even though he isn’t smiling. 

“I am the arrogant one for seeking to debunk these harmful myths? From the paragraph I managed to cobble together after skimming through the books your instructor provided, I have gleaned that my people apparently hated clothes and jumped off of cliffs to their deaths because they believed themselves capable of flight like their dragon mothers. And so many lurid pictures as well. Arus  _ is  _ a bit obsessed with us, is it not?”

Keith expects Dayak to take offense, but she looks like she’s trying to hold in a laugh.

“You are quite unlike your brother,” Keith says.

Lance takes Keith’s meaning immediately. “Of course. Luis is a tactician, not a scholar. Nor should he have felt obligated to deconstruct your prejudices.”

“Why do you feel obligated then?”

“I do not. I simply hate lies when they’re so poorly told.”

“Back to the matter at hand, you two,” Dayak says.

A memory of something Keith had read in  _ Baku’s Complete History of Herbs and Potions  _ perforates his aggravation. 

Keith says, “That the Belí devised at least twenty uses for the Naxzelan Ivy plant, found on the banks of Taujeer. Reduction of fevers, reduction of swelling, use as an anesthesia for surgical procedures. It was even used as an inebriant.”

The Belí’s face is perfectly neutral, impossible to read. After a beat he says,

“Good enough. At least forty uses, though.”

Something else comes back to Keith from the pages he’d read on Naxzelan Ivy, and he 

feels his irritation rising again. 

“The core of the Naxzelan Ivy plant holds a poison that causes incurable bacterial infections in living things. It is transmissible through all bodily fluids, even sweat. Incubation period of up to three days. Some people say it’s even what killed the first Arusian king, Zarkon.”

“That is speculation, Keith,” Dayak says, tone exasperated.

“His skin was cracked and peeling. He could barely stand. It wiped out his entire company.” 

Lance holds his gaze, unflinching. He says,

“Zarkon enjoyed drinking mead before his battles, yes? What was that legend again? That he rode into fights with no reins on his horse, flask in one hand, sword in the other? It is just as likely that he drowned in the Taujeeran River before any of my kinfolk could lay a hand on him. Yet I do not see you standing in the street lobbing accusations at taverns.” 

Keith seethes for the rest of the lesson. At the cool arrogance, at how naturally Lance fills out these Arusian clothes, a barbed chameleon. 

At the fact that yes, he remembers. Of course he does. He’s been reading stories of the First King ever since he could hold a book on his own. He remembers that Zarkon was a notorious drunk, and fell into the Taujeeran River in the middle of the night more than once (more than twice) before he ever approached the day of his death.

↡

After their lessons every mid-afternoon, he and Romelle always proceed to the throne room to observe their father and mother manage the grievances of their subjects. Shiro will be king, but kings do not rule alone. Keith and Romelle are expected to provide crucial support and advice, in conjunction with the official council. 

Today Keith sits at their mother’s right, Romelle at their father’s left, as an old farmer with a bent back stands before their dais and raves about how his neighbor has been murdering his chickens by suffocating them in cow dung and throwing them at the old farmer’s bedroom window, all because his grandson “allegedly” cheated on the neighbor’s grandson with the milkboy. A wealthy merchant-woman wants something done about the acrobats from the traveling circus, as too many of her customers are now taking inspiration from their feats of flexibility and ripping the fabrics that they purchase from her in the process, then demanding refunds for the “flimsiness” of the material. Keith catches Romelle’s eye and they both try not to giggle. 

There is a carpenter who is concerned that the more innovative prostitutes at the brothels downtown have been sanding down and reworking the legs of the chairs they buy from him into more… phallic objects. His face is as red as a cranberry when he says this, and Keith has the terribly immature impulse to leap over his parents’ laps and shield Romelle’s ears.

They listen to one hundred and twenty three grievances in total before they break for refreshment. Sometime in the midst of the petitioning, Keith notices that one of the guards at the throne room entrance has been replaced with Vladimir, the guard from this morning. Guards never wear their helmets indoors, only tucked under their arms, so Keith can clearly see that Vladimir’s neck is bandaged up to the bottom of his chin, a terrible overreaction in Keith’s estimation. But he remembers what he wanted to speak to his parents about. The queen has already stepped out with Romelle.

“How were your studies today, Keith?” He and his father descend the dais. 

“Illuminating.”

Samson raises a thick black brow.

“And how are you and Prince Lance getting along?”

“I suspect we’ll be riding two to a saddle by tomorrow.”

Samson glances at him. “Keith.” 

“He is very forward.”

“Just like you then. A leopard sees its reflection and bares its teeth.”

“Why can’t I ever be any unpatterned animals?”

His father laughs. They are at the throne room doors now, and his father stops to speak to Vladimir briefly.

“I heard about what happened at the gates this morning,” Samson says, “I’m glad to see you are well, Vladimir.”

Keith’s never seen a fully grown man preen before, but Vladimir manages it. He remembers himself, and hastily follows it up with a deep bow.

“Thank you, my king. Anything I do in honor of you, I would do again.”

King Samson gives a cheerful, satisfied laugh. He takes the man’s hand, slick with sweat though it is, and claps him on the back good-naturedly. 

“Spoken like a poet.”

“You flatter me, Your Grace.” 

Keith and his father leave the man with his satisfied grin. They walk along the breeze-way as Antok and Kolivan follow closely behind. 

“I have been wondering about something,” Keith begins. 

“Yes?”

“The Marmora members who come too close to the palace gates in their fervor. Why have our guards beat them back like flies? We could simply erect barricades to discourage their approach, or—”

“Keith.” His father stops walking, stares out at the bright green grounds.

“Many people believe that royal blood speaks for itself. This is not entirely true. A king must prove over and over again that he is fit to rule. But he must also prove that those beneath him require ruling. You may rule in there,” he gestures towards the throne room, “with your ear, or out here with your sticks. A king needs to do both. They are, in essence, the same—the explicit reinforcement of difference. The aim is harmony, not balance. Takashi understands this. In time, so will you.”

Keith feels his fist clench. With an effort of will, he straightens out his fingers and makes his voice calm.

“‘Explicit reinforcement of difference?’ What about the Belitian alliance? The Belí are not even human. They are as different from us as a hare to a horse. Why treat them as equals in this way?” This might be the first time Keith has ever mentioned the Belí with genuine curiosity in place of bitterness. 

“We are of the same mind, when it comes to governing.” Keith’s father smiles. “It is only a shame that we discovered this similarity after five hundred years of fighting.”

↡

Keith feels the heat of the morning bearing down on his naked back.

He blocks Acxa’s latest broadsword strike, but just barely. He’s nearly disarmed, kicking up sawdust as he retreats, half-hearted parries to every offensive hit of his instructor’s blade. He can see the question in her eyes as she knocks his sword from his hands, holds the blunted point of the training sword to his neck. She drops her weapon to her side. His conversation with his father from the day before is still heavy on his mind.

“Young master, are you alright? You usually get at least a few licks in before you lose to me.” She’s smirking.

Keith rolls his eyes. “I’m fine. Just a little...” Keith’s gaze shifts to the balcony that overlooks the castle training grounds. Both of his parents usually like to step in and observe his practice for a few minutes each day, but today he only sees his mother. She smiles at him. 

There is the usual group that assembles there too: the teenaged sons and daughters of councilmembers and nobility, chattering away after they’ve taken their breakfast and before their lessons are due to begin. This is nothing new. What  _ does _ have Keith raising a brow is the approach of the Belí, dressed in a dark crimson vest today. It makes his brown skin almost gleam. 

He walks side by side with Romelle and Hunk, a friendly smile on his face as Romelle explains something to him, hands whipping around like they always do when she’s excited. She has a couple of orange blossoms tucked into her long braid, and Keith’s eyes narrow. He feels a growing irritation at the Belí, at the notion that he might have been to Melenor’s Eden. He feels a blooming frustration with Romelle too. She was supposed to be leaving for her annual visit to their aunt and uncle’s place in the west this morning, the estate of the Baron and Baroness Samuel and Colleen Holt. Had Romelle really delayed her departure for this? 

Romelle and the Belí join the giggling cluster. Romelle turns to speak to one of her ladies-in-waiting, and the Belí fixes his eyes on Keith. 

Acxa catches and tracks his line of sight, raises a brow like she does when she has an idea.

“Maybe a change of pace is in order, hm?”

“Luis always hated sword-fighting.”

“Do you hate all the same things your brother and sister do?”

“No, but only because my dislike of things is much more refined. It has its logics. Romelle hates stemless pears. What sense does that make?”

“What I  _ mean _ is that I’ve heard Prince Lance is quite the swordsman. He might even be a match for you.”

“A compliment before noon? Check my pulse, have I passed?”

Acxa rolls her eyes. “I think that an unfamiliar, challenging opponent might reign in your focus.” 

Keith looks up at Lance, whose eyes appear half-normal under the shade of the balcony awning. 

“All right,” Keith says. He grabs a hand towel from a nearby barrel to dry his chest of sweat. His grip tightens around the handle of his sword. 

“Call him down.” 

Acxa turns to face the balcony. “Prince Lance, Prince Keith would like you to join him in a friendly spar.”

Lance’s response is instantaneous and calm. 

“I accept.”

The group of noble youths goes silent as Lance descends the steps to the sawdust. Hot days are common this far south but this is a particularly scorching one. Keith has forgone both his shirt and vest, and Acxa is in her undershirt. But the Belí completely bypasses the wooden bench where they’ve thrown their garments, and Keith realizes that he intends to spar fully dressed. Keith tries to keep the smirk off of his face. No matter. This just means that heat exhaustion might do most of his work for him.

Acxa hands the Belí a practice sword and he takes his stance. His form is perfect. He holds his broadsword in a single hand, his other arm behind his back. Handling swords like this one, even the blunted practice versions, solo-handed is not unheard of, but it makes Keith raise a brow all the same.

“You’re quite sure of yourself.”

“It is a matter of comfort. You strip in public, I wield single-handed. ”

“Comfort, huh? I’m stuck on that conveniently hidden hand of yours. I’m not sure how 

comfortable I’ll be with a closed fist to my jaw.”

“Only slightly less devastated than your admirers on the balcony there, I would imagine.

They seem to enjoy your face as it is.”

That brings Keith up short, but he refuses to give the Belí that satisfaction. Instead he drops down into his stance too, and they gaze at each other over the few feet that separate them. 

Keith had assumed he would have to be the one to make the first move, but as soon as he’s settled in his form the Belí strikes out at him. Their blades clank as Keith blocks the hit, and they begin. Keith almost loses his footing about two seconds in, and he truly has no one to blame but himself—he’d underestimated the Belí’s strength. The Belí appears somewhat slighter in build than him (he’s definitely a bit shorter), and Keith had assumed that in fighting single-handed the Prince would have to sacrifice the strength of his attacks. But every strike that Keith parries, every swing that he jumps back from proves both of his assessments to be incorrect. 

The Belí comes at him with a relentless flurry of blows, unflinching. Yet every single strike is carefully calculated, and the Belí’s cold eyes give nothing away. Keith is usually very adept at reading his opponents, anticipating whether their next move will be an overhead strike, whether they’re planning on pivoting into a feint, whether they’re about to lunge and leave themselves wide-open and overbalanced. This opponent, though, has his mind reeling. 

Acxa was right. This bout with the Belí  _ does  _ reign in his focus.

But he’s still on the defensive, and that’s simply unacceptable. Especially when the Belí whips his blade around Keith’s in a tight, clanging circle that nearly manages to force Keith’s sword from his hands. He’s backed into the barrels at the back of the training space, hits one so hard it nearly tips over. He ignores it. The Belí braces the flat of his blade against Keith’s and presses forward. They’re almost chest to chest like this, muscles straining. Keith sees the beaded sweat on the Belí’s temples, and this close the creature’s strange eyes are whiter than blue. Frigid.

“You’re a long ways from a bow and arrow,” Keith grits, pushing back against the Belí’s sword.

The Belí almost looks like he could smile.

“I’m better with a bow and arrow.”

“Yeah? Stick to them.”

Keith ducks, and the Belí’s sword meets air. Keith circles around him and strikes out towards the turned back. But the Belí has reflexes as fine as the point of a needle, and turns to catch Keith’s hit with the middle of his blade. When Keith strikes out again, on the offensive now, he nearly catches the Belí in his face. Here’s what saves him: the Belí bends backwards, spine arching in the feat of a contortionist, and Keith hits nothing. The move doesn’t disorient him that much, but it throws him off-course enough that when the Belí comes back up, he drives his sword towards Keith’s neck so blunted metal scrapes against blunted metal. The tip rests millimeters away from his throat.

Keith distantly hears the overdramatic gasps of their captive audience. 

“See?” the Belí says, drawing his sword back. “No closed fist necessary.”

“Of course not. Only circus tricks.”

“All that matters is that if these were honed swords, you’d be clutching at your throat right now, spitting blood into the sawdust.”

Keith feels his hackles rise, like a goddamn dog, and the Belí stares him down. The Belí drops the practice sword he’d used at Keith’s feet.

“Thank you for the little game, princeling,” Lance says. He turns and heads to the stairs without looking back once. 

Acxa strolls back to him, arms folded across her chest.

“Don’t say it.”

“I will be quiet as a mime’s grave, my prince.”

↡

Calculus is evil.

Keith is convinced that it’s enough to make the devil break into a church to pray. 

He has his lesson with Professor Slav a couple of hours after that training debacle with the Belí. Calculus may be a nest of devious, well-wrought intellectual traps but Slav has been so patient with Keith, and so relentless with his instruction that Keith has retained much of the information quite against his will.

He shares this lesson with the Belí as well. This is how he learns that Lance has a mind that assesses, analyzes, and thinks in the spirit of falling dominoes, of urban planning, of  _ if-then-so’s _ . It is like watching him on the sawdust all over again, ruthlessly calculating but flexible as bamboo. Throughout the span of their hour and a half long lesson, the Belí does not make a single snide comment or direct a single correction Keith’s way, completely engaged with Slav in some discussion of the minimal surface equation and its championing of the non-linear and on and on and on. Mother of God, Keith thinks the Belí is actually  _ enjoying  _ this.

Keith distracts himself by reading ar andom old pamphlet under the table, something he’d found tucked away between an unfinished writer’s manuscript on the aphrodisiacal properties of different clothing dyes and another manuscript (finished) on the various use of swords (besides the killing!). The pamphlet seems to be some sort of multi-page review for an event called the Feral Fancies. It talks about a day of revelry where circus performers come to the palace and impersonate the Belí, acting out different moments in shared human-Belí history. The impersonators use quill ink to draw on the Belí’s “tattoos.” The performers will then leave the palace to traipse through the capitals, singing songs of the Belí’s brutality in battle and salaciousness in everything else. The date on the pamphlet is from about seventy years ago, well before the Exchange began. Keith holds no love for these creatures, but the entire affair strikes him as outrageous and unnecessary. 

Lance doesn’t even look Keith’s way as they depart the lesson room. Keith hates that he notices. 

He and his parents see Romelle and Hunk off to the Holt estate that afternoon. His parents are coughing a bit, just as they usually do when they’re on the verge of colds. But it seems that whenever one of them does, it startles the horses somewhat. It’s certainly peculiar, but it doesn’t hold Keith’s attention for long. They’ve held off on embracing Romelle, fully aware of how much she hates germs.

“Hunk,” Keith says as the guard is preparing to mount his horse, “You know how much we appreciate your devotion to protecting Romelle. But you’re allowed to spend some time with Shay too.”

Keith watches as a disarmingly adorable blush burns through Hunk’s deep brown skin.

“With all due respect, my prince, Shay has her hands considerably more full with your 

cousin Katie.”

“You’ve found time before,” Keith teases.

“I’d hoped you’d forgotten about that, my prince.”

“I certainly have not. Neither has that statue of King Zarkon on my aunt and uncle’s northern lawn, I’d venture.”

Hunk’s blush deepeens. “You are cruel.”

Keith laughs. “See you in a few days, Hunk.”

Keith turns to Romelle, already sat astride her horse, looking every bit of the princess that she is.

“No hug goodbye?”

“The last time I tried to hug you you elbowed me in the ribs!”

“You snuck up on me!”

Romelle rolls her eyes. “See you soon, brother.”

Then, with a wink,

“Don’t let Prince Lance forget about me.” 

Keith hardly has to exaggerate his gag.

In the hours, then entire day, that follow Romelle’s departure, the halls are considerably quieter. The palace is still crowded, sure, (it always is), but Romelle always brings with her a full-bodied kind of noise. It’s one of Keith’s rare days off, no lessons, no training, no Belí. He certainly enjoys the peace as he sits on the window-seat in his chambers in the early afternoon, a book on Elven shapeshifting in his lap. Though he does find himself missing Romelle already. She visits their aunt and uncle every year, but whenever her trips overlap with one of Shiro’s absences Keith feels a special kind of loneliness.

The strange partial silence is also the reason that Keith almost immediately picks up on the disturbance outside of his room. When he opens the door, he sees some servants rushing past. His heart is in his throat.

He pulls a curly-haired youth to the side.

“What’s going on? Are the king and queen all right?”

“Yes, my prince!” The boy looks startled, like he’s shocked at the mere implication that there would be anything wrong with the monarchs. “It’s Prince Estilucero. One of Queen Krolia’s maids found him collapsed in the garden.”

Keith keeps his voice steady as he asks,

“Which garden?”

“Melenor’s Eden, my prince.”

“Where is he now?”

“Some of the other servants are helping him back to his chambers. I’m sorry for leaving my post, my prince, I just wanted to see if they required any additional aid—”

“That’s all right. I won’t keep you from providing your help any longer.” 

“Thank you, my prince.”

Keith watches the servant’s retreating back as he thinks. Collapsed, huh? 

Though Keith hardly ever spends much time in the west wing of the palace, he’s familiar with the spacious guest chambers there. He used to play hide-and-seek with Romelle and Shiro in them when they were younger and the chambers were unoccupied, wrinkling tapestries and curtains, getting chased out by the exasperated servants. 

When Keith gets to the doors of the guest chambers, one of the palace guards, Throk, is ushering away a small crowd of attendants. Keith feels his irritation melding with his suspicion. Keith has ears like a bat. He knows that the servings girls and boys whisper about Prince Lance all the time, how pretty of a face he has, how poised and elegant he is. Keith has very good reason to believe that their concern isn’t purely altruistic.

He bypasses the other guard standing watch, takes a few deep breaths before he knocks on the door. 

“Who is it?”

Keith swallows his surprise as he realizes that it’s his mother’s voice. He swallows back his bitterness too as he replies,

“Keith. I wanted to check up on Prince Lance.”

“Come in, my love.”

Keith pushes past the door to find his mother standing beside the large canopied bed. Lance is laying under a thin sheet pulled down to his waist, his shirt opened to bare his chest. Keith finds a morbidly curious part of himself checking for tattoos, though he knows that Belí typically only tattoo their extremities. As expected, there are no markings. 

One of their physicians, Ryner, is sitting beside the Belí’s supine form. He has a damp washcloth over his forehead, and Ryner is checking his pulse at the wrist with careful fingers. 

When the Belí looks up at him Keith feels his mind reeling again. The Belí’s face is different, more agreeable somehow. His mouth, usually arranged in a straight sarcastic line whenever he addresses Keith, takes its natural shape, full and striking. His cheeks are flushed. There are even some curls messily pressed into his face by the washcloth over his forehead. 

It would be quite the convincing performance, if those sharp, cold eyes didn’t give him away.

But Keith holds his gaze as he says,

“I heard you were feeling faint. You are regaining your strength, I hope?”

“I am, Prince Keith. Thank you for your concern,” Lance says, voice devoid of its usual hard edge, “I am so grateful that Corina found me. I don’t think I would have had the energy to rise if she hadn’t called in the guards to help me.”

It takes Keith a moment to realize that Corina must be the name of one of his mother’s maids, the one who apparently found the Belí.

“I am glad to hear it. Could I ask how you found yourself in the garden?”

Melenor’s Eden is, by design, not an easy find. It is at the heart of the palace, behind several winding hallways. It is also guarded around the clock by specially selected sentries, because of its placement directly under the bedroom windows of the monarchs.

But when Keith looks to his mother, she doesn’t seem overly concerned about any of this. Keith realizes, with a burst of acrid displeasure, that the Belí must have been spinning his lies long before Keith arrived.

The Belí looks to Queen Krolia, an act of deference that only makes Keith’s displeasure burn hotter. Krolia nods her encouragement.

“This is, in truth, a bit embarrassing.” The Belí even manages to adopt a deeper blush to fit the bullshit line. Bravo. 

“I’ve been feeling dizzy since I sparred with you in full dress yesterday. I thought it would go away, but it did not. I was particularly disoriented on my way to my botany lesson just a few moments ago—Throk can attest. I just needed some open air. I spent most of my childhood in the mountains and I’m not really used to confined spaces. I remembered that the garden was nearby and I…” Lance looks to Krolia again, eyes somehow softer. They look… apologetic, goddamn him. “I’m sorry for any offense I’ve caused.”

“You have caused no offense,” Krolia tells him gently.

Keith asks, “You made it past two armored guards and a locked door while completely disoriented?” 

“I don’t recall seeing anyone, though I must admit my memory is… faulty. No one stopped me, and the door was unbarred.”

Keith narrows his eyes. There is something exceedingly strange about this. The sentries stand guard for three-hour shifts at a time. Keith may not be a mastermind when it comes to calculus, but arithmetic has never been a problem—a brief look at Shiro’s watch tells him that the Belí would have been discovered a maximum of forty-five minutes ago, which lands in the middle of a guarding block. Keith knows that he’s playing this incorrectly, knows he shouldn’t say it but he does so anyway,

“Were you unarmed?”

“Keith,” his mother warns. “I think we should let Prince Lance rest, right Ryner?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

Queen Krolia makes her way across the room, her jaw set in an expression that demands that Keith follow her.

His mother leads him to the window at the end of the hall, a ways away from the guards.

“Keith, why must you antagonize him?” She doesn’t sound angry.

“Mom, he’s  _ clearly  _ lying!”

“So?”

Keith’s eyes widen.

“So?” Keith parrots, incredulous. 

“Think about this, my love. We cannot prove that he is lying, and I will not risk our alliance with Ekrim by pitching around baseless accusations—” Keith opens his mouth to say something, but his mother raises a hand to stop him,

“Which is what they are at this point in time, Keith. Throk  _ did _ see Prince Lance, and admits that he seemed a bit out of sorts. The guards assigned duty this afternoon  _ were _ absent. They were drinking in the hall, and that kind of brazen defiance cannot be tolerated.”

“Cannot be tolerated?”

“They will be let go.”

“But—!”

“A Belitian prince nearly lost consciousness on their watch. Any sort of discipline short of termination would be inappropriate. I would hope the Belitian king and queen would do the same, if you or Shiro were in Prince Lance’s position.”

Keith feels something like cold air at the back of his neck, like he’d felt when talking to his father about the Marmorites.

“You would?”

Queen Krolia holds his gaze steady. “Yes, I would. And Keith, my love, ruling is a tenuous thing. Intuition is important, but it is not everything when it comes to diplomacy. You must be able to verify the things that you claim. Make your truth theirs too. It will become unassailable only then.”

His mother squeezes his shoulder. “I would hug you but I’m still sick, my dear. And I refuse to give you an excuse to miss your lessons.”

Keith groans as his mother laughs.

Keith makes a show of walking away from the Belí’s chambers with his mother, of heading in the direction of his rooms. But once he’s completely out of her sight, he rounds back to Lance’s quarters.

Throk is still standing guard, now joined by a rugged, handsome soldier named Rolo. They look like they want to say something as Keith turns the knob of the door, but they keep quiet.

He locks the door behind him.

The Belí is on his side. He appears to be sleeping. Keith makes no effort to quiet his approach, because he  _ knows _ that Lance is fully awake. 

There is something distinctly personal to Keith about having watched this dangerous Belí lie to his mother’s face, every facet of his excuse so perfectly in-place that neither Keith nor Krolia could say anything regardless of their suspicion, like watching sentient shadow come for you in your paralyzed sleep.

Keith mistrusts all Belí on principle. He mistrusts Lance because he is not a fool.

These are the thoughts that are bubbling inside of him, so that by the time he makes it to the side of Lance’s bed he has lost hold of his carefully contrived calm. 

He’s on the bed before he fully recognizes that he’s moved, flipping the Belí onto his back and pinning his wrists together in one hand. Lance’s eyes flash, and he kicks up, nearly dislodging Keith. But, bizarrely enough, he goes still when he sees that it’s Keith. His eyes reset to their unreadable pale blue.

“Where were these reflexes yesterday when your mother watched me geld you for ten minutes straight?”

Keith’s grip on the fine bones of Lance’s wrists tightens, but Lance does not flinch.

“Where did you hide your weapon?”

Lance raises an unimpressed brow.

“That is what you’ve pinned me down like a roadside whore to ask?” 

Keith tightens his grip on Lance’s wrists some more. Still no reaction. 

“Turn this room upside down if you want,” Lance says, “uproot every single pretty little flower in that garden. You will find nothing.”

Keith’s grip tightens even further as he grits his teeth. Lance tilts his head to the side, stretches the long line of his throat like a tiger at leisure. 

“Does it upset you, princeling? That you cannot hurt me?”

“What did you do to the guards? They would have never left their posts in the middle of their shifts, not willingly.”

“Do you even know their names?”

“That is not what I asked. ”

“I may have bested you yesterday, but even I cannot over-power two fully-grown soldiers alone.”

“You tricked them, then. And now they’ve been dismissed because of you.”

If Keith wasn’t inches from Lance’s face, he would have missed it. But his proximity allows him to immediately catch the way that the corner of Lance’s mouth twitches. Keith takes it down for what it is: a signal of his surprise.

“Why should I care that two Arusian dogs have been sent away from their kennel?”

Keith feels his anger rising. It must show in his face because Lance says,

“Hit me then, princeling. What are you capable of when you actually mean it?”

Keith stares down at Lance’s smooth, cold face through his rising anger. But all he can think about are his father’s words, about how similar they are. Impossible. Keith is nothing like this sentient bag of glacial daggers.

“Stay out of that fucking garden.”

Keith, through sheer force of will, releases Lance’s wrists, gets up from the bed, and leaves.

↡

Keith is a heavy sleeper.

He supposes it presents an especially vexing dilemma for his attendants: let the prince sleep through his obligations, or risk reaching whatever level of offense that slapping a royal awake constitutes. Because the most effective way to wake Keith up, as discovered by Romelle, still remains a solid open palm to the face.

His attendants have worked out a system though. They’ve found that dragging him to one edge of his bed or the other by pulling his sheets will wake him every time.

So the feeling of his body shifting, attendants carrying out this routine, is not an unfamiliar one. But when he opens his eyes, he notices that his room is still dark. Two male attendants (Lance’s words from yesterday come back to him:  _ do you even know their names? _ ; he thinks one of them is… La-Sai, or something?).

La-Sai (?) says, voice urgent,

“My prince, you’ve been summoned to the royal chambers.”

Even through the haze of his drowsiness, Keith picks up on the curious phrasing.  _ Summoned by _ instead of  _ your mother the queen  _ or  _ your father the king.  _

“Summoned by whom?”

“Ryner, my prince.”

Keith frowns, sitting up. “Are my parents all right?”

La-Sai hesitates, and Keith shoots up from bed to grab his robe.

The attendants can barely keep up with him as he rushes to his parents’ chambers. There are only two guards outside of their door, instead of the five or six there might be in the event of a potential assassination attempt—a good sign.

When he pushes into the room he immediately notices that all candles have been lit. He steps into an unnatural, flickering morning.

His parents are lying side by side under the covers, and he watches as Ryner helps his father drink a cup of something. Another physician, Ina, presses the flat of a stethoscope to his mother’s chest and listens. 

Both of his parents’ faces are pale, paler than he’s ever seen them. Their lips are dry and flaking. It doesn’t seem to be any fever Keith’s ever seen or read about, it doesn’t look like they’re sweating at all. His mother looks like she’s going to be sick, and Ina quickly thrusts a tin bucket her way so that she can retch into it. 

Keith can’t understand it. They were perfectly fine less than twenty four hours ago. His parents never get this sick, even under the Olkarion flu.

“They’re both running fevers,” Ryner tells him, “intermittent shallow breathing. A bit of mucus build-up, but the honey-based draught I’ve given them should help with that.”

“Some sort of advanced infection?” Keith asks.

His father responds. His voice is as deep and steady as it usually is, which puts Keith at ease.

“It certainly feels like it. We got through your years, six to eight, when you would steal the guards’ spears and run around the castle with them point-first. We’ll get through this too.”

Keith feels the tight tangle of disquiet at the center of his stomach begin to loosen, cord by cord. 

“Is there anything you need?”

His mother replies. “We have quite the ledger of petitions to get through. It is a lot of work for a single person, we were planning on simply cancelling the day…”

“I can do it.”

His father raises a brow. “Are you sure?”

Keith knows himself. He has no lessons today, and this is one of his rare days off from sword-training; he needs the distraction. Else he will be tucked into his window seat all day, worrying over his parents’ states as he bites his nails and turns over the unread pages of some antiquated history book on Arusian pottery.

“I’ve been sitting in on these meetings since I was fourteen. Do you not trust your own instruction?”

Most parents would take it as impertinence. But his mother and father laugh.

“Okay,” his father says, “point taken. I am granting you temporary power of court, and I am directing Councilwoman Sanda to sit with you for today’s petitioning.”

Keith leaves his parents’ chambers to let them rest, and Ryner follows him, in need of a draught to make sure they actually sleep. The whole of the kingsguard stands watch outside the chamber entrance now, in full mail.

Ryner stops Keith in front of the door. Keith doesn’t like the hesitant look on her face. He has never seen Ryner wear that expression before.

“What is going on?”

“That is the problem, my prince. I am… not sure. I had, of course, originally believed this was a simple cold, then maybe a Drulian respiratory infection. But… this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Whatever this is seems to be wringing them dry. Dehydration, cracking skin.”

Keith lines up several questions in his head. He is not sure he is prepared for the answer to any of them. He poses the one that sits dense and leaden on top of the others.

“What is being done to treat them?”

Keith hears what Ryner says— _ fluids, draughts, distillation of iron-based compounds to fortify the blood _ —with a cramped head full of clanking thoughts. He finally manages a question:

“Could you set the physicians’ assistants, maybe a couple of the physicians themselves, on apothecary research? You’ll need to know what this is before you can treat it effectively, right?”

Ryner nods. “Yes, my prince.”

Ryner stands there, and Keith realizes that she is waiting to be dismissed.

“You are excused.” 

Keith goes back to his rooms to write a few quick letters to Shiro and Romelle, purposefully omits the “this sickness is unlike anything we’ve ever seen part.” To write it down would be to congeal it into fact, and Keith is not ready for that. 

As his servants dress him in his room, the royal assistant Merla runs through the day’s agenda. Petitions in the throne room will not begin for another hour or so. There are ambassadors from the outlying Arusian colonies that need tending to. There is unrest on the Eastern Arusian island of Krell, one of the premier’s estates has been set ablaze by a lit handkerchief tucked into a glass bottle, and the region’s leaders are at a loss as to how to proceed. But don’t worry, my prince, your parents have already drafted a plan with the Council and all you will need to do is read through it with them.

Keith listens to all of it with the steady, measured countenance of a man who knows exactly which duty he will perform first.

When his servants have finished dressing him, and Merla has finished reading through the agenda, he leaves the room. Kolivan and half of the kingsmen are standing guard outside his parents’ room. Antok and the other men are outside his, and he dismisses his attendants so that he can speak to them alone.

When Antok and the men follow him to the Belí’s guest chambers, when he steps into that bit of power, it feels a little less like he’s a child clomping around in his father’s too-big shoes. The walk to the guest chambers is just as simple as before, quickly becoming familiar once again. 

When they reach the doors of Lance’s rooms he tells the guards to stand outside, and he does not bother to knock. 

Lance is fully dressed, sitting at the table fiddling with something. As soon as he’s aware of Keith’s presence (which only takes half a second; Keith would be impressed if it were anyone else), he tucks it away. Keith catches the faintest silver glint of the object. He’s immediately on alert, but he holds steady. No use losing himself like he had yesterday.

Lance looks up. “Here to bend me over the table next?”

Keith ignores him. That’s one of the only ways to deal with Lance, Keith is learning.

“I do not know, exactly, what you’ve done to them,” Keith says, “but I will figure it out—”

“Again with this? I’ve already told you that you will find no weapon—”

“And  _ when  _ I do, you will be beyond any physician’s help—”

The Belí has the audacity to roll his eyes.

“What are you on about, princeling—”

“The Arusian monarchs, my parents, have come down with the most  _ peculiar  _ sickness, not even a full day after you were found in Melenor’s Eden under the most suspicious conditions. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Lance holds his gaze, expression even.

“Say exactly what you mean.”

“When I prove what you’ve done, you will be executed.”

Keith knows how he’d expected Lance to react. He’d expected a flare of something, surprise like yesterday, anxiety, maybe a bit of fear. But all he gets is what he always seems to get, the cool near-indifference.

“My death would start a war. My family would not care if you had proof, it would be the greatest slight.”

“How would your family handle attempted regicide?”

“They are quite a bit more careful about these things.”

Keith keeps his hands behind his back, nails sinking into his palms. Lance speaks again, before he can respond.

“You would take no issue with inciting a war. Do you truly think that you could beat us back a second time?”

Keith answers with all honesty. “Yes.”

“Then in addition to being a sub-par swordsman, you are a fool.”

“You are a soulless cancer.”

“I have nothing to do with your parents’ sickness.”

Keith doesn’t know why it catches him off guard. Of course Lance would deny the accusations. Who wouldn’t? But Lance says it with the same simmering fierceness he’d asked of Keith:  _ what are you capable of when you actually mean it?  _ And for the first time, Keith feels something like doubt.

That just won’t do.

“Here’s what’s going to happen: you will be under constant surveillance by the kingsmen, kept to your rooms, until I figure out exactly what you’ve done. We will scour every inch of Melenor’s Eden for confirmation of what I already know—that you are a hateful, murderous, deceptive creature.”

“You people  _ do  _ all sound the same. Is there a common script somewhere that you all read from between mutilating Belitian children and sucking the cocks of the royals, the only sector of my society that will have you?”

Keith’s nails sink even deeper into his palms. If they were any sharper he’d be bleeding right now. Lance continues, and Keith is on his last thread of patience.

“And are you so confident in your parents’ rule that you truly believe no one would attempt to rise against them in this way? Do you think this alliance, this exchange, is universally loved?”

Lance’s eyes are still cool, but now Keith can see the strain, how much it’s taking him to keep his composure. Lance is angry, though Keith has never seen such a calm rage.

“Your people hate us, Prince Keith. You think you understand how much, but you do not.”

↡

“I wasn’t so sure at first, my prince. But I stayed up, I stayed up one night watching my neighbor’s house from my window—I could see it perfect, our houses are stacked like firewood, my prince—and I saw it. I saw the father dragging our bathing tub from the front steps and washin’ his goats in it—”

Before Keith can respond to the middle-aged man, Councilwoman Sanda leans over to him.

“My prince, you can simply dismiss petitioners with such trivial concerns.”

Keith frowns. “My parents would not.”

“Yes, but—”

“His is not a trivial concern,” an unfamiliar voice says. It travels from the side of the throne room, the vicinity of the pillars.

“Who speaks?” Keith asks.

A woman, brown-skinned with silver-streaked brown hair to her waist, steps forward. The first thing that Keith notices is that the elements of her physical appearance are discordant: her hair is graying but her face is young. Her feet are bare like a peasant’s but she wears the blue dress of a minor noble.

“I do, my prince. And this man’s personal matter is not trivial. Downtown is overcrowded, families sleep four to a room.”

“That is unfortunate,” Keith allows, and he finds that he means it. “But this city is full to bursting, my lady. What do you suggest we do? Repurpose the houses of the nobility into communal spaces?”

Keith intends it as a joke, and it lands as such. The guards, even Councilwoman Sanda, all laugh. 

But the woman’s face does not change.

“Yes,” she says. 

She continues. “It is a problem that would be easily resolved if the court of your mother and father spent half as much time on domestic matters as it does appeasing the Belí.”

Keith catches movement out of the corner of his eye, one or more of the guards advancing on the woman. He raises a hand and they stop in their tracks. 

But whatever Keith would have countered her comment with catches in his throat. 

La-Sai is running into the throne-room full tilt, face a vivid red. Through his panting he manages,

“My prince! Your presence is required in the royal bedchambers immediately!”

Keith rushes from the dais. He is aware of the kingsmen behind him, but their steps are faint against the hard, heavy banging of his ricocheting panic, in his throat one moment, his stomach the next. Their steps are indistinct next to what La-Sai tells him as they rush to his parents’ chambers, the news that collapses into him hot and screeching like something half on fire, that curdles the air in his lungs so that by the time they reach the rooms, he’s exhaling in hard, labored puffs.  _ The king and queen are unresponsive _ .

When Keith enters the chambers, the main room is alight with the activity of plain-robed physicians assistants and palace servants, rushing past with stoppered bottles and apothecary books in their hands. 

Keith goes into the bedroom and finds several doctors surrounding his parents. He only recognizes Ryner and Ina among them. Ryner is leaning over his father’s supine form with her ear up to his nose and mouth, listening for breath. Ina is preoccupied with his mother, using an instrument Keith has never seen before, a tool with a flat, disc-shaped round of metal connected to two ear-pieces by a long black tube, to attend to her. She is pushing the disc-shaped part along her chest, brows drawn together in a concentrated frown.

One of the physicians, a curly-haired man with a hoop through his nostril, notices Keith immediately.

“My prince,” he says, “they will be all right. We will make it so. Please, go rest.”

“No,” Keith says. Swallows. “I will stay.”

Keith has a mind that tips into pessimism at the slightest bit of pressure. But here is where hope finds him, up against the wall of his parents’ bedchambers, then gripping a wooden post that holds up their canopy. Their faces are pale as bone, cracked like impacted ceramic. 

There is a moment that comes. 

Ryner stops passing over his father’s body with her hands. Ina stops passing her instrument over his mother’s chest. Their fingers shake and they look up at him with faces drawn and mouths open. There’s a guileless fear that passes over both of their faces, as if they’ve done something wrong even though, in the days weeks months years that come after, Keith will realize that they had done everything they could. They look impossibly young here, hands twitching but aimless. 

Keith has never lost anything in his life. Not once. Up until now he has been able to treat death as an unproven theory, as an abstract end, as scenes rendered for history book pages where Belí drive their arrows through human necks and bare their blood to open air. It is not in a palace room with crimson and gold tapestry, a half-pitcher of water on a bedside table. It is not the density of shock—his and Ryner’s and Ina’s and every other physician forced still by what has happened—in a bedchamber, hot and sticky as noontime humidity. It is not here. It should not be here.

Keith must have been clipped free of his voice, because he should be screaming right now. He feels bodiless, limbs unhooked at their joints and carried off by forest spirits, their laughter acrid.

When Keith was nine he fell off of his horse during riding lessons and broke four ribs. He swore he could feel them in chunks then, clattering against each other like keys on a single metal loop. It was a pain with borders and textures and ridges, mappable and definite. This… When he takes another look at his parents in bed, d— 

This is a pain in suspension, the formless moment between a lightning strike and the thunder that limps after it. 

Keith is sure someone tries to stop him as he leaves the chambers, but they do not catch him. They must not be trying hard enough. Antok could definitely keep up with him if he really wanted to. 

Keith doesn’t really know where he’s going. Through his deadweight mental fog the castle is overbright and unfamiliar. Keith does not check but if he had to guess, he’d say it’s barely past noon. Every shaft of light that jumps through a window he passes jars him so badly that his stomach stirs and he feels like he could vomit.

When he stops, shin aching (he must have hit it on something), it is in front of a huge painting that takes up almost the entire wall that it hangs on. Keith has seen it once or twice before, but his mind is still unable to figure out exactly where he is in the castle. Keith knows this picture. It is a daytime scene pre human migration, its details so often contested that they’ve adopted the weight and blur of myths. A group of forest spirits, some standing and some crouching, collect a batch of Naxzelan Ivy from the bank of the River Taujeer. Their body markings are natural blues and greens and deep reds that coil all over their skin, nothing like Belitian tattoos. Their heads are completely shorn, big round eyes framed so thickly by lashes that they each look like they’re wearing charcoal. Their irises are a deep, warm brown.

Keith hears the distant clashing of metal on metal. It startles him. There’s shouting somewhere, so disembodied at first that for all he knows it is coming out of the painting itself. He finds the nearest window he can and looks out of it. This hallway seems to be at the front of the castle, and the aperture that he stumbles to overlooks the front lawn.

Keith’s brain is still lagging, stomach still queasy, so it’s not easy for him to immediately process what he sees. There seems to be a thick, advancing line of soldiers in black armor, helmets over their heads. They are fighting with the palace guards with swords of the same slick black color. They are… winning. Keith sees several palace guards laying face-down in the grass behind the advancing line, unmoving. In the distance, closer to the palace gates, Keith sees another crowd. They are all dressed in plain brown trousers and loose white tunics. The Marmora Order. 

This is a coupe.

Keith watches a group emerge from the front of the palace, a woman flanked by two black-armored guards. The woman with silver streaks in her hair, from earlier that day. “Haggar!” he hears someone shout, so loud that it carries up to him. The woman inclines her head, so chillingly regal you would think she was overseeing a tourney, not the massacre of Arusian guards. Haggar.

The noise of clashing swords gets closer and closer, and Keith’s chest tightens as he watches the black-armored soldiers cut down resistance. The castle guards are specially selected, exceedingly well-trained sons of the aristocracy and the best military-men that their country has to offer. There is no way it should be this easy. Keith watches as the blade of one of the black-armored soldiers slices the blade of a palace guard in two. Keith wishes he was armed but it is an idle, ridiculous thought—there is no way he could hold a sword right now. The black-armored soldier drives his blade through the guard’s neck, and Keith finally vomits.

He misses the mess he’s made when his knees give out, but just barely. He cannot deny that it feels nice to be pressed against something solid, something that reminds him that all of his limbs are still attached. 

There are noises inside the castle now too. Shouting. More ringing swords. He needs to  _ move _ . He hears swearing, so close by that he looks up.

Lance is standing at the end of the hall, dressed in Arusian clothes with a satchel slung across his shoulders.

Keith finds it absurd how right he’s been—Belí are lightning rods for catastrophe; if they are not causing it themselves, it’s swarming thick around them like flies to overripe fruit. In all of this, everything that’s happened and  _ is  _ happening, he locates an unbridled insanity in how quickly the simple presence of a single element—this Belí—could ruin all there is to ruin, a rot that must eat to spread. It’s so fucking wild that it’s funny.

So Keith laughs. 

Lance is frowning at him.  _ Frowning _ , imagine! It is the most feeling Keith has ever seen on his face, and it’s so out of place that Keith laughs harder. 

His mother and father have gone from perfect health in a country at peace to dead in their beds while their castle is seized.

“A coupe? Nice touch,” Keith says, “And you’ve been here less than a week. You are efficient, I’ll give you that.”

Lance is silent, careful, before he says,

“I had nothing to do with your parents’ sickness, princeling—”

“I don’t believe you,” Keith says, voice tight. Anger tastes a lot like bile.

“What will you do, then?”

Keith gets up, unsteady on his feet. Something roiling as sharp and acidic as shaken vinegar in his mouth. He thinks he’s moved by a surge of hot rage, because there’s no way his legs should be able to carry him this fast. 

All he hears from Lance is the briefest intake of a sharp breath. In the next moment, Keith’s fist is connecting with his jaw. Keith hates that his hand hurts with it. And he didn’t know there was a graceful way to take a punch until now. Lance barely stumbles backwards, doesn’t even really look shocked. 

He turns his head to the side and spits blood.

“Has your mood improved?” he asks, still mocking. Even now, still mocking.

It makes Keith angrier. He finds himself wrapping his hands around the Belí’s neck, squeezing down to feel its blood pumping warm underneath his grip. He finds it rattling, to make out in no uncertain terms how physically similar Lance is to a human. Lance feels impossibly brittle like this, something that could snap. Lance hits him in the chest, the stomach, claws at his face, and even through his adrenaline Keith knows they’re solid, impactful blows. But Keith realizes with a feral, pluming madness that in a fair hand-to-hand fight, he is the stronger one. Lance stares him down, eyes watering as Keith slams him into the wall.

Keith feels something slice at his neck, and his grip slackens. It’s enough for Lance to wrench free. With a flash of his cold eyes he hits Keith once,  _ hard  _ at the soft underside of his jaw. The last thing that Keith remembers seeing, before he blacks out, is Lance rubbing at his throat.

↡

Being incapacitated by a closed fist to the face is nothing like falling asleep naturally, Keith learns. Getting knocked out sends you into a blank space that is constricted and dreamless. When he falls out of that sleep it’s like being kicked in the back by a well-trained athlete.

When he wakes up his throat is so dry that his first conscious inhale makes him cough. For a moment, he just  _ is _ . And then he realizes that he’s laying on a hard cement floor in the dark, and then he remembers.

He sits up against the marrow-deep ache the memories bring, eyes adjusting to the darkness (as much as they can anyway). He seems to be in some kind of disused tunnel, curved ceiling and walls of cracking, stained cement. When he brings a hand to his neck, stiff from laying on the cement, his fingers pass over the cut Lance had given him, crusted over with blood.

Lance.

Keith hears movement, and whips his head around to find that he’s not alone.

“You are exactly as heavy as you look,” Lance says.

Keith feels his anger churning again, but his neck and back are stiff, his face is sore, and the cut at his nape is stinging.

“Where the fuck am I?”

“The castle, technically. Maybe seventy feet underground.”

Of course. The thick damp smell, the cement lumpy as oatmeal perennially frozen mid-boil. Keith has been down here before, on a guided tour with his father. These are the tunnels that Queen Melenor led her soldiers, servants, and children to safety through, when the great dragon Blaytz razed the palace to the ground with his firebreath four hundred years ago. It’s a useless bit of trivia, really, but it’s comforting to retreat to factoids once again.

“Am I where you draw the line, then?” Keith grits out. 

Lance sighs. Keith cannot see his face but he can imagine his expression.

“I did not do this to your parents, princeling. Has it really not occurred to you yet? That the super soldiers with the pointy luxite swords might somehow be related to what happened to the monarchs?”

Keith breathes carefully. Everything inside him feels like it’s at immediate risk of crumbling, somehow dilapidated and dry.

Lance’s words make a terrible kind of sense. The worst sense. Keith blinks hard, once, against a tightness at the center of his head that seems to be preventing his tears from coming. For the first time he starts to actually believe it, that Lance had nothing to do with this. But something else sticks out to Keith too.

“Luxite? What is that?”

Lance pauses, like he’s considering something. Then he says, 

“When a dragon dies its firebreath overtakes its body. The ash that is left behind is hard and sturdy, sturdier than any other material known to man or beast. It is also infused with the earth magic that the dragon held while alive. We call it luxite. Humans have no word for it, because the death of a dragon is an exceedingly private affair. Which is why I don’t understand...”

Lance trails off. This is… also new. Keith has never heard him sound so unsure.

“What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand how a company of human soldiers got their hands on it. This is… not good.”

Keith snorts. “You are given to understatement.”

“Should I hit you in the face again? You were so quiet. I miss it.”

“This luxite,” Keith swallows, “it can cut through—”

“Anything.”

“Dragons still exist, then?” Keith’s breathless with the implication.

“Clearly.”

Keith pauses, backtracks a bit. 

“What you said about the strength of the luxite. My parents were not… they did not fall to swords.”

“No. I believe they were poisoned.”

It hurts to talk about, it hurts so much. But Keith finds himself saying,

“That’s impossible. Most Arusian poisons are effective within hours of ingestion. They… were around for much longer than that.”

“I do not think the poison used was Arusian. What did your parents look like when you saw them?”

Keith’s mind retrieves the images without his say-so, pins them to the back of his eyelids like tapestries. His lungs feel overfull, so he starts to breathe quicker. He’s wheezing now, air wafer-thin and stale. He hears it, these brittle, miserable gasps.

“Princeling? Princeling.” Lance sounds like he’s far down the tunnel, his voice faint. 

“Breathe for me, Keith,” Lance says, and suddenly it’s Shiro’s voice too, telling him the same as Keith tries to work through his panic at holding a sword for the very first time.

“Breathe,” Lance and Phantom-Shiro say together.

It’s slow, but he manages to get his regular respiration back. It finally feels like his lungs are working with him and not against him.

“We can’t stay here for much longer,” Lance says, “I have a feeling that—”

“Look at these goddamn burrows. Fuckers were prepared for anything, weren’t they?” It’s the unmistakable voice of a soldier.

It’s still far away, but Keith hears the clanking armor. Lance grabs his wrist, wrenches him to standing. 

“Quietly,” Lance tells him in a barely detectable whisper.

Keith channels everything he’s ever learned about light, swift footwork into running as quickly and silently as he can. The dark is unchanging as they hurry down the tunnel. Even though the zero visibility would still make the tunnels impossible to navigate alone, Keith wishes, absolutely desperate with it, that he’d studied their layout more when he’d had the chance. 

How the hell does Lance know where he’s going? They turn a corner, then another, then another as the soldiers continue their unrelenting advance. How the hell can Lance  _ see  _ where he’s going?

They’ve turned their fifth or sixth corner now when Keith hears another group of soldiers coming down the tunnel they’re standing in. Keith sees the distant, bobbing kernels of yellow torches getting closer.

Lance jerks him down another corridor straight ahead. They stop for so long that he’s about to risk whisper-asking Lance what’s going on. Lance tugs Keith forward again. Keith thought there was a wall in the direction that Lance is now pulling him towards, but his spatial awareness must be shot. That’s what he thinks, at least, until he hears a swift  _ whoosh  _ and spins around, hands meeting a solid wall. Right where they’d entered.

“What the hell?” he whispers.

“Quiet,” Lance responds.

Keith reaches out to run a hand along the sliding wall, but Lance catches his wrist.

“Don’t.”

He hears the set of soldiers they’d spotted from afar approaching.

“That Belí’s missing too, eh?”

“Aye. But he should be easy to find, ‘s impossible to forget a face like that. Pretty as sin.”

“Bullshit! You ain’t never seen him.”

“You’d put your cock in an old worn boot if the laces made it tight enough. The fuck do you know about  _ looks _ ?”

“He ain’t lying. They’re evil little monsters but this one’s as gorgeous a thing I ever saw.”

“Wonder what he’s like on a cock?”

“Yeah well, keep wondering into that hand of yours.”

“The prince is a right comely one too—”

“Keep your fucking mouth shut about the prince. His parents might’ve been spineless ticks but he’s still Arusian royalty.”

“Lovely or not his head’s comin’ off.”

It doesn’t really fill Keith with dread or fear or anything darker, hearing that. He’d put the pieces together himself anyway. It would be the next logical step, to get rid of all members of the reigning family who were still at the palace. 

Keith’s mind flies to Romelle at their aunt and uncle’s estate, to Shiro at the border. They’re safe for now as far as he knows, but for how much longer? His fist clenches.

Keith has another thought too. Keith has heard about the elemental forms of magic that all mystical creatures are born with the potential to practice: earth, fire, water, air. Ether is the fifth, even though it is suspected that only Belí born of a full-blooded faery parent and a full-blooded dragon parent were ever able to manipulate life force due to the result of their conception—the tremendous instant melding of dragon vitality with faery magical genius. It’s not surprising that those pairings were prohibited long before humans ever crossed the Frozen Sea. Even so, everything Keith’s read on ether treats the manipulation of life force as pure fantasy, which… they live in a time of faeries and elves and forest spirits who fuse with trees to rest, but whatever you say, Arusian scholars. 

Lance’s movement of this wall must mean he’s an earth elemental, but it begs the question: why is there a secret recess in these tunnels? Are there more? But Keith cannot ask any of this, lest they be overheard. 

He and Lance stand there until the voices retreat. They stand there long after that too. Keith is getting restless by the time the other set of soldiers, the group they’d run from first, troops past. They’re nowhere near as chatty as their sword brothers.

Keith doesn’t know how much time passes. He realizes with a bit of a start that he’s still wearing Shiro’s watch. Lot of good it does him, though. He can’t see shit right now.

Lance’s hand is still around his wrist, and Keith does not pull away. He finds it oddly grounding. They stand there in a near perfect silence whose duration Keith counts out in the metric of heartbeats and breaths, because that’s all he’s able to register right now. 

Then Lance whispers,

“Stay close.”

He steps up to the wall in front of them again. He does whatever he did before and the expanse of stone disappears with another  _ whoosh _ .

Keith listens closely as they hurry down the corridor, searching for the sound of steps that are not theirs. The further they go, the more sheer the darkness becomes, until Keith can make out the sewn designs in Lance’s emerald green doublet.

He looks up and realizes that there are some grates in the wall beside them now, thin and contained in rectangular sets high up near the curved ceiling, like basement windows. Lance still has that satchel across his shoulders. His curls are springing with every step, hair alive.

Keith can see the tunnels a lot clearer now. He sees how more corridors, nearly innumerable, branch off from the path they’re taking. Lance turns, then turns, then turns again in a dizzying array of maneuvers. If they hadn’t already outpaced their pursuers this would definitely do it.

Lance comes to an abrupt stop in front of a huge, circular grate in the wall. Keith’s momentum makes him crash straight into Lance’s back, and he gets a faceful of hair.

“Gods above, do you have a metal plate in your head?” Lance whispers, wincing.

“If we were on the sawdust it would be quite the valid maneuver, the way you fight.”

“Not that I would know much about it, but I am told that there is some grace in losing. Find it.”

Keith rolls his eyes as Lance puts a hand on the stone right next to the gate. It’s clearly locked, but just a few moments later the structure is creaking, and with a metallic  _ pop  _ Lance is pulling it open as its hinges squeak. Though he’s read about earth magic, watching it in action takes his breath away. It’s effortless, the way that the stone yields to Lance like a conscious, obedient thing.

Now that Keith’s paying a bit more attention he realizes that on the other side of the grate, there is a small cramped space with a rusting ladder built into the wall. Keith can tell by the bars of distorted light on the ground that it’s still bright out.

He steps into the tiny space with Lance, who carefully closes the grate behind them. 

Lance looks between him and the ladder, and Keith gets his meaning, the reasoning behind it. Keith should climb up first because he has a much higher chance of immediately recognizing their surroundings. This is his city.

But Lance is the one with the grate-popping elemental magic. Keith shakes his head.

Lance climbs up ahead of him, poised even in this. Keith follows him, though he sees nothing but clear blue sky through the slats from this vantage. He does his best to ignore the clumped strips of grime that squish between his fingers every time he takes hold of a rung to scale higher.

“What do you see?” he asks.

“A rocky road with some greenery and a crop of trees beyond it. Some market stalls to our right, houses to our left. It smells of fish.”

“We’re at the edge of the capital,” Keith says, immediately remembering the stalls of river fish at the marketplace on the northern edge of the capital. He’s passed it plenty on his way to hunts. The smell is… hard to forget.

“Will you be able to..?”

“Yes, give me a moment.”

Lance just peers out of the opening for a few beats, likely checking for Marmoran soldiers. When he deems it safe he puts a hand to the stone beside the metal rim of the grate. Moments later he’s sliding it away, and uninterrupted sunlight sloshes into the dark shaft. 

Lance peers down at him briefly, as if to say  _ quickly _ .

Lance hoists himself up and out of the hole, and Keith follows, does his best to ignore how the sudden brightness hurts his eyes after so long underground. When they’re both up and out on the road, in public, they have but a second to figure out what to do next. 

Especially because as soon as Keith glances over to the market stalls beside them, he spots several black helmets bobbing above the heads of the locals. Lance spots them too, and they’re rushing across the road towards the collection of trees. 

This is not a proper wood. Keith knows that it will soon come to an end, and they’ll likely end up in one of the smaller villages that surrounds the Capital, still miles and miles out from the next major city Tarrin. But it’s enough cover for now, so they run.

This may not be a proper wood but the trees are huge and thick, so close to one another at times that he and Lance must turn sideways to squeeze past them. Branches whip their faces as they dash through, leaves catch in Lance’s hair till it’s pockmarked with bobbing green teardrops. Keith, sides burning from exertion, has the passing thought that his hair must be much the same.

They reach a large fallen tree trunk and they stop, panting. Lance sits on the trunk but Keith forgoes that all together, plops down into the dirt. When he catches his breath, and Lance’s own panting transforms into something more regular, the first thing out of his mouth is,

“Why’d you save me?”

Lance looks down at him, and for a moment Keith expects him to respond with something from his usual catalog of caustic remarks. Instead he says,

“I did not let myself think about it.”

“You dragged me into the tunnels. I must have slowed you down. You could’ve gotten away much quicker if—”

“You sound as though you would have preferred I leave you to the super soldiers, princeling.”

When Keith says nothing, Lance says, with the same tone he’d used back at the palace to tell Keith he hadn’t murdered his parents,

“I saved you because you were there. Because you were almost laying in a pool of your 

own vomit with a tear-streaked face and I moved on impulse.”

“You dragged me down several halls and several flights of subterranean stairs on impulse?”

“My impulse is a formidable thing.”

Lance had always struck Keith as the type to plan things twenty or thirty steps in advance before he ever deigned to do them. But the set of his jaw makes Keith believe this to be true too.

“This will be an extremely difficult time for both our countries,” Lance says. “I know what the Marmora Order thinks of us. Much of this takeover has to do with how strongly they detest your court’s overfamiliarity with Ekrim, it’s impossible to deny.”

“I thought you said your people could beat us back this time, if another war erupted?”

“Yes,” Lance snaps. His voice settles into something more contemplative as he says,

“But that was before I knew about the luxite. And if they’ve somehow gotten ahold of that, there’s no telling what other magical weapons they have managed to obtain. A war waged like this would be catastrophic.”

“We have to get that throne back,” Keith says, mostly to himself. He’s referring to his brother and sister with the “we,” and Lance seems to understand that.  _ Back  _ catches in his throat like bitter corn; it’s finally setting in, that his family’s royal seat is gone, his parents along with it. Lance says, 

“Shiro is on mandatory duty as commander of the standing troops at Feyiv, yes?”

Keith nods, smiles. “He was reluctant.”

Keith hears something like fondness in Lance’s voice when he says.

“Yes. I’ve never met a pacifist warrior prince before. Gods, when he came to the palace in Oriande he hated the deer hunts almost as much as I did. He is a good person. I wonder…” Lance looks at Keith, open curiosity in his eyes. He looks so much younger like this, face so lovely it’s proving a bit difficult to look at dead-on.

It’s not hard for Keith to figure out what Lance means to say.

_ I wonder if you’re like him. _

↡

Lance is one hell of a fighter, but this country is unfamiliar. Keith has extensive knowledge of the Arusian landscape, and though he’s well-trained he much prefers his odds with someone else at his side. This arrangement instantly strikes Keith as one of mutual benefit, one that might actually ensure they both make it out of this alive.

“We can part at Feyiv,” Keith says as they approach a break in the trees. “The Marmora Order might have the Capital, but Shiro’s troops are loyal to him. They will guarantee you safe passage across the border into Ekrim. ”

“And your sister?”

Keith takes a steadying breath, recalls his uncle and aunt’s faithful bannermen, their huge fortune, their stable of over a hundred well-bred horses if the need to suddenly flee arises (and it’s looking likelier and likelier that it will arise).

“She should be safe with my uncle and aunt for now. Their men are fierce, and they’ll be able to run if they need to. And Holtstone is practically a fortress.”

When they reach the edge of the trees, a few farmhouses lay before them, speckled across the greenery.

“We need to change. We’re too conspicuous like this,” Lance says. 

The house closest to them has clothes drying on the line, several paces away from a goat pen. Lance starts to head over to it, but Keith catches his arm before he can fully leave the cover of the trees. Lance breaks free of his hold instantly. 

“Or did you  _ want  _ to prance around in a dirty, gold-lined invitation for capture?” Lance says.

“These clothes are theirs.”

Lance gives him an understanding nod, pats the satchel at his side. Keith hears the faint clinking of coins.

When they’ve determined that the coast is clear, they hurry over to the clothesline. Keith tries to ignore the accusing eyes of a black-spotted baby goat as he pulls a pair of rough trousers and a shirt from the line. He’s heading back to the crop of trees to change when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye.

Lance is unlacing his vest right here in the pasture, in full view of the bleating goats.

“What are you doing?” Keith hisses.

Lance peers up at him through his curtain of curls but doesn’t stop unlacing.

“Saving time,” he says, pulling the vest open.

Keith just gawks at him as he drops it. Lance reaches back to pull the shirt over his head, and then Keith’s gawking for an entirely different reason. 

The tattoos are intricate, coiling in mesmerizing black whirls and loops from the back of Lance’s hands to just above his shoulder. They stop short of his neck, remind Keith of the lace sleeves he’s sometimes seen Arusian dancers wear when they come to entertain and perform at the palace.

They must’ve taken forever.

Lance takes a shirt from the line. The muscles of his back bunch and flex with the movement. He is lean but defined. If Keith had been in doubt, he is in doubt no longer—Lance has the build of someone who exerts themselves daily in concentrated exercise. His is far from the idle courtly physique that Keith, even after their sparring match, was half-expecting. 

As Lance raises his arms to pull it on Keith notices a few long, raised scars on the underside of Lance’s biceps. They interrupt the tattooed patterns, and they startle Keith. He tries to mask his surprise as he starts to undress and redress too, quick with it. As he ties the string that holds his brand new pants up he sneaks a glance out of the corner of his eye, terribly curious about the markings on Lance’s legs.

And he’s glad he peeks. 

The tattoos that run from the tops of Lance’s thighs to his ankles are even more intricate, wind around each other like dragon tongues. They’re beautiful.

“Well, aren’t you the little pervert,” Lance says.

Keith’s eyes snap up to his face, then snap away.

“Fuck off.”

Lance snatches up a black shawl dangling nearby, and Keith takes a plain brown hood. He’s only ever visited Tarrin in passing, so it stands to reason that very few residents have seen enough of his face at close range to remember it with any clarity. Well, except the peasant children, but Keith recognizes that their poverty and age will considerably weaken their credibility. Keith is relieved.

Figuring out what to do about their clothes is tricky. Arus makes use of scarily effective tracking dogs. There’s a pig pen a few paces away from the goats, and Lance comes up with the idea to throw them into the pile of growing waste at the corner. Lance’s drop-off startles one of the larger pigs, who barrels straight for them and ends up diving into the pile instead, trampling their clothes. They’re almost fully buried now. It would be an absolute miracle (or a scythe-like stroke of bad luck) if any Arusian hound were able to pick up their scents from the fabrics now. Keith tries to forget the fact that he has plenty of articles (perfectly covered in his scent) back at the palace. 

Tarrin is roughly ten miles north. Keith’s father always preferred to hunt in those woods, loved how the heavy canopy added an extra layer of challenge. 

It’s but a few hours riding for a royal caravan with spare horses at the ready. But it would take a full day’s riding to reach if you were unable to swap out your mounts. A full day’s riding if you had a single horse.

It’s great that Keith knows all that, because a single horse is exactly what they find. 

Keith remembers the “two to a saddle” comment he’d made to his father and laughs bitterly. Lance looks at him but doesn’t say anything.

The horse is a sturdy gray rouncey with soft brown eyes. It’s tied to a small tree beside the squat brown farmhouse. Lance and Keith stand out of view of a nearby window as they observe it, the shakes of its head languorous. It certainly doesn’t  _ look  _ like it’ll kick them in the skull at their advance, but one can never be too sure about these things. Romelle doesn’t  _ look like  _ she could snap a grown man’s wrist, but she certainly can. Their mother had made sure of that.

“Bareback then?” Lance says.

“Unless you have a saddle in your smallclothes.”

“This obsession you have with my smallclothes.”

Lance is approaching the horse before Keith can figure out how to respond to that. The horse is gentle as he unties it, and before long he’s leading it away from the trunk.

Keith hops onto its back as Lance circles around and leaves some money on the sill of the front window. Keith notices out of the corner of his eye that it’s a small pile of gold pieces. He sees now that they’re unmarked, completely untraceable to one country or the other. Keith wonders at that.

“That should be enough to build a whole new stable and buy up the horses to fill it.”

Lance digs a hand into Keith’s thigh for leverage, swings himself up onto the horse. He wraps his arms around Keith’s waist without a hint of hesitation, and it throws Keith off a bit— how comfortable Lance seems to be with both his body and other people’s.

“There’s plenty more left,” Lance says about the gold. “Besides, not everyone is as selfish as you all are. You people would steal the sun out of the sky if you could.”

“Imagine the market for that.”

“Just ride.”

↡

They have to rest eventually.

They pause next to a stream after several hours of hard riding. Keith listens to the rouncey lap at the running water as he fills up his palms and splashes his face.

The sun is crawling down past the line of trees beyond. It catches everything in a net of dripping, burnished orange as it prepares to kneel quiet for the night. It is sunset but it’s still hot out, right on the cusp of summer as they are, and Keith sweats even under his thin peasant clothes. Lance appears completely unbothered, looks just as fresh as he had when he’d stumbled across Keith in that hallway in the palace.

Keith feels hunger setting in, and for the first time in his life he’s forced to ignore it instead of immediately sating it. He suspects that it will be a useful skill for the foreseeable future.

They ride into the night. It would be dangerous on a longer road, increase their chances of running into bandits (though he doesn’t doubt that he and Lance would be more than able to hold their own), but they progress without incident. 

By the time they reach Tarrin, stars are pricking through the sheet of black sky like hot needlepoints, it is late, and Keith feels his eyes drooping. Lance is at the reins now, Keith’s arms around his middle. He refuses to admit it to himself but he’s soon relying pretty significantly on Lance to hold him up, a steady weight before him.

Tarrin is no small town. It’s fairly busy, even at night. None of the people they come across even look at them twice, except for one old woman with several missing teeth who yells at them as they pass, “I hope you fuck better than you drive a horse!”

Lance responds in kind. 

“Bet it’s easy to put that mouth to use when there’s nothing in the way.”

“Lance!” Keith hisses.

“What? I am blending in. It would be stranger if I’d said nothing at all. Now, do not blow our cover. Until we reach our destination, I am Lio and you are Ren.”

The old woman looks vaguely impressed as they ride past her.

Keith directs Lance to one of the cheaper inns, frequented by commoners and low-ranked soldiers. He will not test the strength of their disguises by going to a higher-end lodge. The innkeep is a surly older woman with the lean, sharp face of a prey bird. Three small children pull at her skirts as she speaks to them in short, gruff sentences. But after Lance puts down a single gold piece for their lodging her face brightens up like a lit candle wick, and she looks like she’s two seconds away from showing them to their space herself. 

She has one of the inn servants lead the rouncey to the stables out back to be watered and fed. She even provides them with a meal of meat stew, bread, and cheese (Keith does his best to pace himself). She offers them multiple rooms but Lance declines. It’s tactical. Should they have to leave in a hurry it will be far easier if they’re as close to each other as possible. 

When Keith goes into the room and sees the bed, he feels exhaustion arcing through him from scalp to toe. It hardly matters that it’s a bed he must share with Lance, as he had the horse. It matters even less that he can’t remember the last time he’s shared a bed with someone he wasn’t actively fucking. Keith strides over to the bed straight away, half-expecting sleep to take him before he even lands on the sheets.

Lance grabs his arm before he can proceed any further.

“You are not dropping down into a bed we share without bathing first.”

“Take the floor then.”

Lance fixes him with an unimpressed look. Keith notices it now, in the low lamplight of the room. Lance’s sharp eyes are cloudy with fatigue. After sustaining a punch to the face (though there is no bruise; likely some dragonblood fuckery), getting choked out against the wall, dragging an unconscious full-grown man into the tunnels alone, enduring a full day’s travel… He’s exhausted too. He just hides it better. 

Keith’s shoulders sag.

“Where is the washroom?”

He can’t deny that it feels nice to be free of the day’s dust and scum. He finally gets the chance to wash his mouth, a pleasure he never thought he’d have the chance to miss. 

When he does get into bed he sinks heavy past dreams to a deep black sleep.

↡

In the morning, before Keith’s eyes open, his hand finds warmth and clings to it. 

The heat in Arus can be antagonistic. When Keith was ten the capital experienced a heat wave so bad that people were fainting in the middle of the day, collapsing into streets and forcing carriages to swerve and crash. A popular baker’s wife nearly lost her leg after a wheel rolled over it as she lay crumpled and prone on the road right outside the pastry shop. 

Keith’s always much preferred the more contained warmth of bodies, skin’s hushed heat.

His mind catalogs the curve of a waist, and he tugs whoever it is closer. 

Whoever it is knees him in the stomach.

“Gods!” Keith gasps, nearly tumbling off of the bed.

Lance is sitting up on his elbows shirtless, pupils narrowed to slits. They return to their normal shape so quickly Keith’s doubting what he saw. Lance rolls his eyes.

“So you’re up,” he says, rising.

“I think you burst my spleen.”

“Oh please. Your speech is far too coherent for that to be true.”

Keith flops back against the pillows. There’s a surge of grief welling up in his stomach so he talks straight through it. Lance is heading to the washroom when Keith says, 

“You mentioned that the Marmora Order might’ve gotten its hands on magical weapons other than the luxite. What else?”

He pauses. “There’s not a single part of a dragon’s body that cannot be made a weapon post death. It is why their deaths and funerary processions are so secret, so well-guarded. They do not wish to be the instrument of massacres, nor the tools of war. They are unfriendly creatures yes, but they are fair. And they are kind, though few recognize their kindness for what it is.”

Lance looks at Keith and his eyes ice over, like he’s revealed far too much. His voice had been almost fond. Of course it’s perfectly common for Belí to be proud of their heritage (“we are dragon-born” was a popular war chant, for example). But Lance speaks now like one would speak of a friend they have not seen in some months. 

“What kinds of weapons?”

“I thought you were a scholar.”

“All academic Arusian texts adhere to a strict need-to-know policy when it comes to histories.”

“Yes, you have definitely proven your tremendous gaps in understanding.”

Keith lets that pass unaddressed, though his eyes narrow. Lance continues. 

“Scales can be melted down to make nearly impenetrable armor and shields. Teeth can be filed into spear tips that splinter inside flesh once the thrower hits their mark. Stomach acid, if harvested carefully enough, can be used as fuel to make fires hotter than a hundred to a thousand forges, depending on the size of the dragon. Their saliva can be venomous, and a single drop of their blood is capable of driving a person mad enough to eat their own fingers.”

Lance gives Keith an amused look, and Keith doesn’t know what expression he’d been wearing but he changes it immediately. Lance’s amusement is never a good sign. Keith says,

“Your people are the cuddly derivatives then?”

“Have you so quickly forgotten what happened the last time you tried to ‘cuddle’ me, princeling? Another attempt will have me aiming lower.”

Keith winces and his hand reflexively tries to reach for his crotch, but he stops it.

River boats leave at noon for Feyiv weekly, and they cut the ten days it would take to reach Feyiv overland to five. In the first instance of luck Keith’s had in several days, a vessel is departing today. He and Lance collect tickets from the designated stall near the Tarrinian marketplace. They collect provisions as quickly as they can (they manage to pick up some additional articles of clothing while they’re at it too), though they don’t need much since they’re travelling by fully provisioned vessel. 

They’ll even have to part with the rouncey before they head out for boarding in about an hour. Lance, endlessly charming when he wants or needs to be, manages to find out through casual conversation with the inn-keep that she’s in need of a pack horse. They’re speaking with her at the tavern on the first floor of the inn, where she’s filling in for a bar-maid who’s recently gone into labor (twins! Can you believe it?). 

Keith can see through the window behind the bar that the air outside is shimmering with heat. He groans. 

The tavern is mostly empty this early in the day. There are a few men talking over porridge in the corner, a family with a father wiping his young son’s nose with the edge of his sleeve, another table of men where a grinning, bearded fellow is currently pulling a giggling serving boy into his lap. 

Keith wasn’t even paying particular attention to the group in the corner, but their conversation drifts over to him anyway. It pulls his focus. 

“Vladimir’s dead?! You’re bullshittin’!”

“Caught two daggers in the stomach protecting the old guard from assassins, served his fucking ass off on the border near Feyiv, just to die from a little fever.”

“‘Little fever?’ ‘S not how I heard it. Heard he was cracked and peeling everywhere, could barely stand. His nuts looked like balled up chalk.”

“Saw ‘em yourself, you vulgar lyin’ bastard?”

“Nah, his wife said. Folks are also saying that he probably got hit with a bit of that Naxzelan Ivy.”

Keith goes perfectly still as he listens in.

“Yeah, heard that too. Heard one of those Marmora bastards stuck their filthy nails in ‘im, that’s how he got it.”

With a gulp, Keith’s remembering the man muttering about ash dragons at the palace gates. The one who’d scratched Vladimir’s neck. Then scenes are clacking against each other in his mind like a series of swinging pendulums. Vladimir in the throne room. Vladimir’s sweaty hand. Vladimir shaking hands with his father. His father was such a tactile person. If he hadn’t stayed clear of touching Keith or Romelle for fear of getting them sick with what he’d believed to be a cold at the time, they would have also succumbed to the poison. With his mother transmission likely couldn’t have been helped, considering how much space she and his father shared. 

“Yeah. Those Marmora fuckers took the whole palace out, even the goddamn stable boys. ‘Parently they started with the doctors who’d treated the old king and queen, probably wanted to eliminate the chance for transfer—d’you know that shit only moves through piss and sweat?—slit their throats like pigs.”

Keith blinks hard, fast. He swallows. He can’t afford to get sick again, not here. Not when they’re so close to heading to Feyiv. To Shiro.

“Gotta admit, it’s a perfect fuckin’ plan.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. Plan’s so perfect, why are all the heirs still skippin’ around? They

couldn’t even get Prince Keith, and he was there when they stormed the castle!”

“They’re sayin’ the Belí he’s fuckin’ magicked him outta the castle. Kid’s gotta have one celestial cock, to get one of those things to stick its neck out for ‘im like that.”

Lance stiffens beside him as the comment passes over them. Keith marks it down as nothing more than a very Lance-like reaction to the suggestion that they’re involved. 

Until Keith senses the swift movement of a body behind them.

Keith doesn’t have time to shift or react, but Lance does. Lance tucks a hand behind Keith’s neck, pushes his head down onto the surface of the bar, and the knife blade meant for the base of his skull barely glances across his scalp. His head is ringing with the force of impact. He tastes copper as blood trickles from his nose to his mouth.

Keith hears shouting behind him, the clattering of utensils, the overturning of chairs.

He has but a few half-seconds to lift himself from the top of the bar. When he turns it’s to the face of the bearded man from before, the handsy one with a lapful of serving boy. 

The bearded man lunges at him again, right for his throat. Keith ducks and slides out of the way. He knocks several drying glasses from the bartop. The man’s eyes are even as he advances on Keith again, and Keith gathers who he is from his composure. Of course. 

Haggar and the Order knotting up loose ends.

Keith pats around the countertop. His hand closes around one of the only cups he seems to not have pushed to the ground. The man is much larger than Keith originally thought, half a head taller than him and much, much wider across the shoulders. 

But the thing about a solid mead glass to the temple is that there’s not a single man alive it can’t slow down. Even if it’s only for a few moments because they’re built like a carriage, like this man is. 

The bearded man is forced to pause for a crucial few seconds, thrown off balance by the hit of the cup. Lance enters Keith’s peripheral vision as the swing of a powerful leg—he lands a forceful kick to the side of the man’s face.

That’s how Keith learns that a jaw-breaking kick from Lance sounds a lot like the large lock of a banquet hall door clicking into place. That a cracking mandible sounds a lot like splitting marble.

Lance executes the maneuver with smooth, trained intention, doesn’t flinch like Keith does when the sounds all register. He’s definitely done this before.

The bearded man lets loose a shout crowded with the pain that comes with knowing you are confined to a body that will ache, because there’s no running from a broken bone. His yell clears out the rest of the tavern. The people who’d been frozen in shock when the man first attacked Keith now find their wits and flee.

Even so, the man only falls to a single knee.

He’s close enough that Keith’s able to knee him in the head with much force. But that doesn’t completely fell him either. 

Gods above, where did they find this bastard?

Keith’s still dazed from his rapid encounter with the bartop before. His reflexes are a bit shot. He doesn’t react quickly enough to evade the man’s hand when he reaches out and snatches his ankle. He hauls Keith off balance so he lands hard on his back.

The man is looming over him now, dagger in hand, mouth dripping with blood. Keith brings his leg up from his supine position and manages to connect with the man’s crotch. The fucker doesn’t even flinch. And is his package wrapped in steel because  _ Keith  _ is the one who’s knee is smarting right now.

Keith inhales sharply as the dagger arcs toward him. He’s sure it’ll be buried in his throat before he exhales the breath he’s taken.

But the dagger clatters to the ground. Lance is in Keith’s view again, wielding a long piece of glass with a wicked edge. He goes straight for the bearded man’s jugular but only catches him at the underside of his jaw as the man shifts. The man roars at the burning pain the cut must bring to his already-present injury.

The bearded man finds the strength to surge up (though Keith doesn’t know where the fuck he’s pulling it from). Lance grunts as the man drags him down by his hair. They both fall to the ground. The man tightens his grip and Lance winces, even as he’s raising his leg up to knee the man in the stomach. Keith thinks he sees the fucker smile, teeth red with blood.

“You fithe ath prethy ath you look,” Keith hears him say. “Tho happy the Orther wanths you alife.”

Keith scrambles for the dagger that he sees just a few paces from him, next to a mess of broken glass. His hand is wrapping around its handle just as the man is sticking something— something small, clear and tubular with a needle attached—into Lance’s neck. The liquid inside it is dark and glittering, like melted onyx. The level of the liquid lowers as the man presses down on the top with his thumb. Keith’s stomach drops, throat thick. 

He barely has to think about it. 

Lance’s struggling arms go slack, his eyes begin to droop closed, and Keith drives the dagger through the back of the man’s neck, right above his expensive brocaded collar. Dark blood wells up around the blade. It runs down his skin and interrupts rich yellow fabric. 

The man’s body jerks, so Keith wraps both hands around the handle of the dagger and drives it further, feels the muscles of his own arms strain with the effort of forcing a blade through muscle and sinew. He twists the knife. He only bothers to pull it out when the man stills.

The body starts to sway under its own bulk. It favors right so Keith pushes it in that direction. He has enough sense to check whether the man is truly dead. He is. 

Keith’s hands are trembling as he wipes the dagger clean on the sleeve of the man’s gaudy tunic. He can see a dagger sheath attached to his belt, but Keith can’t bring himself to reach for it. He crouches down next to Lance instead. 

Lance’s cheeks are flushed a lurid red. It’s alarming to see him forced into expression like this, when Keith’s never even seen him blush before. His light eyes are murky and he’s struggling to keep them open.

The tube of black liquid is still in his neck. Keith pulls the needle free, rips a strip of fabric from his black hood. He wraps and knots it around Lance’s neck to halt the little bit of bleeding the puncture causes.

Lance is frowning up at him.

“Off… get off… of me,” he’s saying, pushing at Keith’s chest with a surprising amount of strength.

Keith backs up, and Lance tries to struggle to his feet. Keith looks down at his watch. Ten minutes till the river boat leaves. He and Lance had wanted to make it to the vessel with no time to spare, to minimize their chances of running into any Marmoran troops or anyone else their disguises might not fool.

“Lance, you can be as stubborn as you like once we’re on that ship— ”

Lance tries to stand by bracing himself against the edge of the bar, but he misses. Keith gets up quick enough to catch him with an arm around his waist. Lance’s whole body goes rigid again, or at least it tries to. Whatever the bearded man injected him with pours him full of a lassitude that makes it impossible to contract any muscle.

“D… don’t…” Lance is saying as Keith takes one of his limp arms and wraps it around his neck to better support him. His voice is tight, nearly pained.

Keith swallows. His mind is whirring with the sense that there’s something much deeper at play here. It doesn’t make any sense. In the week that Keith has known him Lance has been almost cavalier with physical contact. He’s always treated touch as objective and matter-of-fact. So what is going on?

Keith makes sure to grab the satchel from the ground, fuller with their meager purchases, where it had fallen on the ground during the struggle. He slings it across his body.

He hears the clanking of metal, and looks up at the window before them just in time to see a cluster of black-armored soldiers marching past. There is one muscled guard at the front of the cluster with a shrivelled ear that reminds Keith of a cauliflower curd. When he turns his head and spots Keith through the aperture, he shouts to his fellow soldiers.

He recognizes Keith.

Keith swears as he’s forced to set Lance down into a random chair. He rushes to the front door of the tavern, locks it, then drags a chair over and tucks the top of its backrest under the knob for good measure.

When he helps Lance up again, leans him against his side, Lance tries to free himself. He hits at Keith’s chest with his free hand, but all of his blows are weak enough to ignore.

Keith hears shouting and banging at the door. Lance is heavy, unable to support very much of his own weight, but still light enough that Keith makes good time as he hurries towards the door at the back of the tavern, towards the stables. 

The back of the tavern is shielded by countless large oaks. The humidity is so thick it feels like they’re walking into an open mouth. He hears the soft braying of horses as they approach the structure. 

It becomes readily apparent to Keith that Lance will not be able to hold himself up on the back of a galloping horse without assistance. Keith could sit Lance in front of him, against his chest as he held the reins on either side of him. But it would dramatically diminish Keith’s ability to steer the horse with ease. Maybe even get them caught. He spots a tongue of rope hanging limply from an ill-tied bale of hay, and he has an idea.

He spots the rouncey in a stall, soft brown eyes blinking slowly while she chews some straw. She won’t be fast enough. 

“Sorry girl,” he murmurs as they pass her.

Keith looks down at his watch. Seven minutes.

He finds a mild-mannered destrier in one of the back stalls. His plan takes some exertion (a whole lot of exertion), but after a few close calls where Lance almost falls off of the horse’s back and onto the stable floor, Keith has it.

Keith is facing the reins with Lance strapped to his back, Lance’s head tucked into his neck. He’s tied them together as tightly as he could with the rope that he’d found, wound it around their waists. He feels Lance slump against him, but the rope doesn’t give at all. He’s secure. He’s muttering something so softly that Keith can’t make it out.

Five minutes.

Keith takes a deep, steadying breath as he leads the destrier out of the stable. He directs her into a trot as they leave the cover of the trees. 

As soon as he hits the road outside the inn he speeds the horse up to a gallop. The collection of Marmoran soldiers at the front door whips by in a blurred flash.

“Son of a pock-marked  _ whore _ , he’s getting away!”

Tarrin’s streets are narrow. Definitely not made with the “galloping horse ridden by a desperate fugitive prince” in mind.

Keith feels his teeth clacking with the pace he adopts, prays to every god he knows that the destrier doesn’t trip over one of Tarrin’s wretched loose cobblestones. Pedestrians dive out of the way as Keith tears through. One young woman throws up the basket of fresh bread she’d been carrying as she’s forced to jump out of Keith’s path, and Keith gets a faceful of warm wheat rolls. 

They bolt through the marketplace, crowded with people, and Keith tacks on postscripts to the prayers he’s already sent. He’s panting but as he clears the marketplace, with the only casualty left in his wake the tomato stall the destrier barreled through (an excellent horse, really), he finds the space to let out a sigh of relief. He bolts past the tannery. The Tarrinian river is in sight now. He almost can’t believe they’re about to make it with seconds to spare.

So he almost doesn’t notice the four black-armoured guards astride their own horses, just up ahead of him on the street he’s racing down. Cauliflower Ear, near the front of the waiting group, smirks at him. 

He grips the reins of the horse, turns in a move so abrupt, so sharp, that it nearly sends him and Lance flying into the muck at the side of the road. They turn down an alley, and Keith’s mind is racing, trying to figure out how to get back to the direction of the river. He hears the pounding of hooves behind them, so he turns sharply again. Then again. Then, a solace. He spots an armory and knows exactly where they are.

He reaches the edge of the town, sees a break in the trees that hug the bank of the River Tarrin. He pushes the horse faster, faster, till they’ve hit the dirt of the path. He keeps that pace, the sharp  _ clip-clops  _ of the destrier’s hooves on the cobblestone transformed to dull thuds, until the vessel is in view. It looks like they’re almost ready to depart. The line is quickly shortening. The steward is checking the ticket of a man not much older than Keith and Lance. 

Keith slows the horse to a trot, then an amble, then a complete stop just a few paces away from the back of the line. The steward and the man he’s helping look up at them as Keith cuts the rope around their waists with his newly acquired dagger. He hops off the horse first, steadies Lance before he can fall over into the dirt. He tries to help him down but Lance is struggling again. So Keith does the only logical thing he can think of.

He throws Lance over his shoulder.

The eyes of the steward and young man are as hot as the sun on the back of his neck. Keith smacks the destrier on the side and the horse streaks back towards the town. 

Keith retrieves their tickets from the satchel as he walks over to the steward. The young man finally walks up the plank and into the vessel, but he can’t seem to stop throwing glances Keith and Lance’s way.

As he’s handing the steward the tickets to check, Lance mumbles the first coherent thing Keith’s heard from him since they left the tavern before finally passing out.

“I hope your cock splits down the middle… you thin-lipped shit...”

“Er, two passengers then?”

“Yes.”

↡

After they’ve been shown to their tiny cramped room aboard the vessel and Keith’s laid Lance down on the small single bed, after Keith’s taken a wet washcloth to the blood crusted around his nose and upper lip, after Keith has asked around for a physician to no avail, Lance wakes up.

Though that is far too tranquil of a descriptor for what actually happens.

Keith’s just walked in with two plates full of lunch from the upper deck. It’s barely mid-afternoon, so there’s still some light streaming in through the single slatted window beside the bed. 

Lance jolts awake with a gasp as Keith’s setting the plates down on the small table across the room. 

Keith turns around in time to see several sleek black blades, their flats about as wide across as one of his fingers, shoot out from beneath Lance’s sleeves. Keith’s breath catches in his throat, then almost vanishes all together as their edges glow a nearly blinding iridescent blue. When Lance whips his head around to look at Keith, the glowing black protrusions start to twist and lash like live rope. 

Lance’s eyes are glowing an even brighter blue, pupils thin. Keith’s eyes widen, heart beating hard. Keith can see that there’s even some blue light shining straight through the sleeves of Lance’s plain white shirt. The black protrusions are twisting even more wildly now, coiling and winding around each other and… making the same patterns Keith has seen in Lance’s tattoos.

“Fuck!” Lance swears. The blade-whips disappear without a single sound, and Lance’s eyes return to normal.

Lance frowns. It’s so quiet in their room that Keith can hear the passengers and crew above deck, the rush of the river outside. Lance opens his mouth to speak, but nothing emerges. Keith swallows, no more sure of what to say than Lance is.

Lance looks down at his hands, brows still drawn. He says, 

“I am… usually able to better control them.”

Keith gets the sense that he must tread this ground carefully. He remembers the tube of black liquid from the tavern.

“You were injected with something.”

Lance looks up at him, and his eyes widen a fraction as he realizes something.

“Blacklight.”

“What?”

“Arus has buried Elven histories too? Gods, were you permitted to know anything at all about your enemies?”

“We were always taught that you all are… tentative allies,” Keith says, and can’t help a wry smile from coming to his lips.

He tries to hide his surprise as Lance’s mouth twists up in a similar smile.

“‘Tentative allies.’ Yes, I suppose that would be the term of art for it. In the case of the arrangement that Arus has with Ekrim, it sounds much more appealing than ‘two stalemated opponents holding knives at each other’s throats.’”

Keith frowns, and Lance scoffs at his expression. 

“Come now, princeling. I know you are not  _ that  _ dense. For five years each, our countries get to hold their rival’s royal whelp in glorified hostage. Either state could choose to kill their ward at any time.”

“But it would start a war,” Keith says, echoing Lance’s words from that day in the guest chambers. 

“Yes. That is the power of the agreement, no?”

Keith makes a contemplative noise at that, low and involuntary. 

“What is Blacklight?”

Lance purses his lips as his expression closes off a bit. Keith’s immediately missing the 

openness.

“It is an Elven sedative, used in major surgeries. It’s strong enough to fell an adolescent dragon. The dragons have always seemed to prefer Elves to anybody else, Belí included. They are the two eldest races, and they have found that basis enough to form an easy camaraderie. Utter nonsense. They used to allow the Elves to operate on their young, even. Perhaps they still do.”

Lance brings a hand up to his neck, where the makeshift dressing hides his puncture wound. 

“Blacklight is heavily guarded. Kept behind charms that only those with Elven blood can disarm.”

“So then that assassin probably got his bit from an elf. And he had to have been in the employ of the Order. He tried to,” Keith forces the word out, “kill me, capture you.”

Lance takes a breath. “Yes.”

“That’s how the Order has been getting the luxite, then? The Elves? You said that they’re the race the dragons trust the most. Maybe they know where the dragons are.”

Lance looks up at him. His brows raise in surprise, as though he’s taken aback by Keith’s 

ability to draw those conclusions. Keith lets his offense show on his face.

“Yes, that is what I suspect.” A hint of a smile crosses Lance’s lips. “Hm. Maybe there is a brain darting around inside that head after all.”

“The Elves might be funneling dragon-derived weapons to the same Order that...” the room gives a vertiginous tilt that has nothing to do with the movement of the boat. Keith leans against the small table. He can’t quite say it out loud yet, so he skips over it. 

Keith says, “But none of that explains why the Blacklight did…  _ that  _ to you.”

Keith replays the sight in his mind again, black ribbons sharp as blades but pliable as twine glowing blue, curling in the air while Lance’s eyes flashed. It had been somewhat horrifying, yes, but Keith would be lying if he said the thought of seeing them again doesn’t excite him.

Lance purses his lips as he searches Keith’s face for something. It’s quiet for so long that Keith doesn’t think Lance will reply. Then Lance says,

“The Blacklight did nothing but lower my regular physical inhibitions. As you have probably gathered my tattoos are enchanted. They are mobile, and they function as blades and ties. They have quite a reach.”

Keith’s eyes widen as a child-like exhilaration seizes him. Incredible. He’s never heard of this function of Belí tattoos before. He tells Lance as much.

And watches Lance’s face shutter closed like the front windows of a shop at sundown.

“This is not a typical function of Belí tattoos.” That is all the response Keith receives, delivered with Lance’s typical frigidity. Keith knows to leave that particular line of questioning alone. He considers the tattoos’ rope-like capabilities, and something dawns on him.

“Your tattoos, is that how you got me down to the tunnels? You tied me up and dragged me?”

Lance looks amused. “Very good, princeling. After you threw me over your shoulder like a bag of chicken feed I do believe we may be even.”

Keith rolls his eyes. His mind drifts back to the conversation they’d been having about the Elves and dragons.

“There is something I do not understand,” Keith says.

Lance signals for him to continue.

“You said that the dragons do not want to take part in any wars, not after the one with Arus two hundred years ago. It seems that they would be quite displeased with the Elves if they found out they were instigating conflict like this.”

Lance agrees. “The dragons would char them where they stood if they found out.”

“Then why are the Elves putting themselves at such risk?”

Lance looks up at him, a teasing glint in his eyes. This is… also new. At first it seems incongruent with the mood and topic of conversation, but then Keith realizes that Lance’s expression is rueful. Whatever he’s thinking of is only funny because of how absurdly grim it is. 

“Elves were raiding Belitian villages while Arusians were still fucking inside straw-roofed shacks on the bank of the River Taujeer. Your hatred is impressive, but it is hardly original.”

Keith’s next words swell inside him hot and unexpected as he lays out all that he has learned about these people, the war, the stories, the gleeful, murderous archery. He didn’t have a single conversation with Luis while he was at the palace. The day Luis arrived Keith had just read from some old text that the Belí ate the eyes of defeated Arusian soldiers in the final battles before the armistice. So when he opens his mouth to speak he is still parsing what exactly he means to say. He speaks slowly.

“I… do not hate your people. Only what they have done.”

“Only what you’ve heard they have done.”

“Yes,” Keith says, a bit helplessly.

Lance observes him, face an inscrutable mask. Then the corner of his mouth twitches like it does when he’s genuinely surprised. 

“I am… of a similar mind.”

↡

Keith takes the plates from the table and walks them over to Lance. There is nowhere else to sit, so he installs himself at the foot of the bed, putting as much space between them as he can. He remembers Lance’s muttering at the tavern, his uncomfortable mumbling on the horse. Keith hands Lance his meal, plain rice and bread. Lance takes it from him without hesitation, but his brows raise a fraction.

“What?” Keith says.

“Nothing. You remembered.”

“That you do not eat meat? Yes. The cook believed we were in the middle of a lover’s spat and meat deprivation was my way of striking back at you.”

“You are lying.” 

There go those dimples again. Keith hasn’t seen them since the very first day Lance arrived at the palace. 

“You are smiling.”

“Yes, I do that. Can you believe it?”

“I have seen Shiro fashion a wing splint for an injured butterfly out of paper ripped from a Calculus text. I can believe much.”

The smile stays as Keith starts in on his own plate.

“Why don’t you eat meat?”

Keith tries to keep his voice neutral, like he doesn’t care one way or the other. But he is genuinely curious. Plenty of commoners do not eat meat because they cannot afford it, but money is hardly an object for the family that Lance is from.

Lance breaks the bread apart as he speaks. 

“I believe I was about five. Some faery ambassadors had gifted my family with a few prized cows, and one of them was pregnant. I was playing with some friends near the outbuilding where she gave birth.” Sincerity hues his voice more musical than usual. 

“It was this brown calf with a notched ear and a white spot the size of a dinner plate on his stomach. It was adorable, and I wanted it. Selfish. But people like us are used to getting what we want, no? Even as children?”

“Yes,” Keith confirms. 

“So they gave him to me. I loved that little thing. I used to try to bring him into lessons with me.”

Keith cannot help but laugh at the image—icy, controlled Lance as a chubby-faced youth, a calf clopping behind him through the ancient castle of some of the most powerful creatures in the world. 

Lance looks at him, mouth quirking. 

“Yes, I do suppose it is amusing.” 

Lance pauses to take a bite of bread. Continues.

“Well, they stopped allowing me to take him into lessons. He was distracting, I will concede that point. My governess walked me back to my chambers one day—I had just learned how to make a pink potion that temporarily grants the drinker the eyesight of an eagle, I still remember that. The calf was not there. That night we had veal. I vomited into a potted plant.”

Keith freezes, spoonful of rice still in his hand. He is unsure of what to say, so he says nothing at all.

Lance looks him in the eye as he says,

“There were other calves my family could have chosen, of course. The selection of mine was the point.”

↡

There is not much going on above deck.

Some boisterous men are speaking loudly. An older woman is devouring the mouth of her younger female companion against the support rail. A mother shields her children’s eyes from it even as she tries to sneak furtive glances herself. The man who’d stared as Keith carried Lance bodily from their stolen horse seems to have found a friend, and sits on a crate near the bow with a pretty dark-skinned boy in his lap. He hears the boy giggle “Garnot” into the man’s neck. The captain and the steward are laughing heartily near the mainsail as the captain feeds the rather large blue-and-black bird on his arm. Keith thinks it’s a streaking magpie from the Krellian islands.

The sun is collapsing beyond the thick crop of trees. Keith folds his arms against the guard rail and leans against it as he stares back in the direction they’d come. 

His parents will not receive a proper funeral any time soon. They will not be interned beside their ancestors inside the royal Arusian mausoleum. Keith has never truly understood the significance of being placed near your blood in death until now. It is a soundless completion, the proof of an eternal silence shared. Keith does not know if the gods are real (they have often seemed more fantastical than the dragons to him), but he knows this—his parents once existed, and now do not. Their progenitors once existed and now do not. It is a point in common.

Keith’s stomach clenches, but he doesn’t think he will throw up again. His eyes burn.

The boisterous men are playing a game of dominoes beside him. After a few steadying breaths, Keith joins them.

↡

When he gets back to the room a couple of hours later, Lance is reading something by flickering lantern light, propped up against the scant pillows they’ve been provided.

“I see no libraries below deck,” Keith says.

“I got it from one of the other passengers, a cloth merchant. Did you know that some of your countrymen used to use eels as currency?”

“What did you trade the cloth merchant for it?”

“Nothing but my time and wit. I can be fairly likable, princeling.” 

Keith is well-aware of this. Conscious, too, of the fact that men are drawn to Lance as they often are to beautiful things. Keith is also well-aware that Lance reels in the more combative, sharp-tongued facets of his personality at will. A pretty face is extremely easy to enjoy when one does not know that its owner will knock you flat on your back if need be, all while he tells you where you might stick your sword to put it to better use.

“Well he must not be a very good merchant,” Keith says as he undresses, “if he is making the journey to Feyiv by cheap river boat.” 

“Traveling alongside two princes incognito? I would say he’s doing fairly well for himself.” 

“I thought you said we weren’t to mention our identities aloud?”

“I said that  _ you  _ were not to shout them through a busy town square from the back of a pack horse.”

Keith notices that Lance had filled the small basin on their table with fresh water, so he wets one of the couple hand towels they’d managed to snatch from the Tarrinian marketplace and washes his face as he speaks.

“You know, eels are still used in exchanges on the island of Krell,” he says. “They are very valuable. Some lesser Krellian nobles sometimes include them in the dowries of their sons and daughters.”

“Really?” Lance says. Keith cannot see his face but he sounds intrigued. 

“What? Are you shocked that I know something about my own culture that you do not?”

“In all honesty, yes.”

“You are a lip sore.”

“Nonsense. I am more like an inconveniently located mole.”

Lance’s jab at Keith’s knowledge gaps does remind him of a question he’d had back at the tunnels though. Keith turns to face him and leans against the table.

“Back in the tunnels,” Keith says, “how did you know that alcove was there?”

“A faery mage friend of mine, Allura. Did you know that there were a few faeries who defected to Queen Melenor’s side during the Expansion Wars?”

Keith’s brows raise. “No, I didn’t.”

Lance hums and gets this faraway look in his eyes, like he’s considering something. Keith thinks that maybe this is information Lance has acquired only recently too.

“They were earth elementals who carved out a series of hidden alcoves below the palace. After Blaytz burned the estate down, the elves and the faeries went down to the tunnels to search for your warrior queen. We both know that she got away. Your existence is proof enough of that.”

“Why did the faeries defect?”

Lance looks like he’s about to laugh.

“Why? Well, no one fucks quite like a human.”

Keith’s mouth drops a bit, cheeks heating like some untried boy. 

“What? No. That  _ cannot  _ be the real reason.”

“And yet it was, princeling. Romantic relationships were the primary drivers of defection for faeries back then. They are a, hm, amorous people. Of course those kinds of human-faery relationships are unheard of now, and reviled besides. But not so back then. At least, not entirely.”

Keith lets the words set in for a moment. Of course Keith knows of intermingling between groups; Lance’s existence is proof enough of that. But he’d always thought of dragon-faery interactions as the only ones. 

Lance has already dressed for bed, curls hanging a bit longer around his face, nearly to his shoulders. His hair looks damp, he must have washed it. Keith speaks.

“Should I brace for another knee to the stomach in the morning or should I save myself the trouble and curl up on the floor?”

“If you can keep your appendages to yourself then so can I.”

↡

Keith does end up taking the bed. 

The candle inside their lantern has completely burned out, and the captain is a stingy lout who keeps all spares in his room. Keith doesn’t expect it to be a problem, because he expects to sleep through the night.

He and Lance are forced closer now, because this bed is much smaller than the one back at the inn in Tarrin. But they manage to keep their distance, Keith tucked against the wall while Lance sleeps at the edge. Keith glances back once, when Lance’s breaths are beginning to slow as he drifts off, and is perplexed at how Lance is even managing to stay on the mattress. Likely another function of that Belí agility. It is too hot for blankets, as it was back at the inn, so it’s one less thing for them to worry about.

Keith wants to rest, but when sleep takes him it is not kind.

He dreams that he is in his room, perched on his window seat. He is holding a copy of  _ Baku’s Complete History of Herbs and Potions.  _ It melts and blackens like it’s been set to a boil. When Keith squeezes the pitch-black in his palms it feels just like the grime on the rungs of the ladder back at the Arusian palace’s tunnels. He’s still in his room. The black-melt in his hands hardens into the hilt of a dagger. The bearded man is crouching over Lance again on the ground, his back to Keith. Keith rushes up and drives the dagger into the back of his neck as he had at the tavern, except when the dead bulk tips over Keith sees that it is not the bearded man at all but his own father, blood burbling from his perforated throat. The figure on the ground is not Lance but his mother, her skin pallid and cracked. 

He wakes up gasping. 

It’s dark, and he tries to catch his breath. It’s quiet. Lance must still be asleep.

Then a voice murmurs, 

“Go above deck, the moon is full tonight. Withdrawing to a lighter place has always helped me.”

↡

Keith does spend some time on the deck, under a ripe stemless moon that sticks steady in the night as the river and wind rush their boat further north. When he returns to bed he does not dream.

When he wakes up that morning Lance is gone. He has a moment of flickering alarm as he recalls the bearded man and his Elven sedative, hellbent on taking Lance back to the Order. Back to the people who murdered Keith’s parents, his teachers, his doctors, his stablehands, likely his guards. Dayak. Antok. Acxa.

If he dresses and freshens up in something of a hurry, it is not unwarranted, he thinks. 

As he ascends the narrow stairs to the deck he registers the loud, rowdy sounds of a game being played. Even the captain’s magpie is chittering away, either elated or agitated. There is excited chattering, a single beat of silence, then the roar of a happy crowd. Keith wasn’t even aware that there were this many people on board. 

When he arrives above deck there is a throng of passengers, all with their backs to him, all watching something with rapt attention. Keith, curious, squeezes past some of the onlookers (he’ll be the first to admit he fully deserves the paint-peeling insults he receives as he does so).

At the front of the crowd, Lance sits with his legs folded under him, regal even in the clothes of a commoner. Across from him crouches a rugged man, with a thick beard and a head that vaguely reminds Keith of a holiday ham.

Between them lays a rough wooden board, about as long as Keith’s forearm and as wide across as the shorter edge of a pamphlet. It has two parallel lines of shallow wells running along the length, bookended on each side by a much larger elliptical well. 

Lance’s wells are all empty, while the ham-headed man’s wells are all full of smooth clear marbles. It’s a game of Pit-and-Sow. The object is to clear the pits on your side of marbles, sowing them into your opponent’s wells. Keith knows this game, and Lance has just won a round of it.

“Again,” the ham-headed man demands.

“Naturally,” Lance says. “I will beat you a bit more slowly this time, so you do not miss a thing.”

The crowd laughs, and even Lance’s opponent looks like he’s trying to stifle a chuckle.

They fill the wells with marbles again, all even. This round does not last long. Keith watches the hope in the man’s eyes wane as move by move, bit by bit, Lance empties his wells of marbles. Until he has won again. The crowd cheers.

“Again,” the man demands.

So they go again. And Lance wins again, to tremendous fanfare.

“This is getting a bit embarrassing,” Lance says without malice as he rises to his feet. He grins down at the man, something good-natured and comely. “I will spare you, Tibald.”

The ham-headed man lets out a hearty laugh, like he hadn’t just had his ass dragged for three rounds straight.

“You might look like a springtime flower but yer as tough as they come, eh?” Tibald says, shaking Lance’s hand.

“Are you working up to a marriage proposal?” Lance asks.

“Truth be told, I’m not sure I could handle you.” 

The crowd howls with laughter. Even Keith feels a chuckle bubbling up.

Lance is still speaking to the man, Tibald, when someone leans over to Keith and asks, voice measured and slightly quiet like they’re old friends commentating on a game in progress,

“How much for your whore?”

Keith’s head whips around. It’s that man who’d watched him carry Lance on-board, Garnot. His face looks like it might break out into a grin at any second. 

“He is not a whore, but you are certainly a cock-boil.”

The man’s face hardens into anger. Out of the corner of his eye Keith sees Lance appear next to him.

“And I am sure you like to hear how magnificent of a fuck you are directly after your two pumps to completion, yes? You would need a theater actor, not a whore.”

Lance eases through the rest of the crowd as Garnot is still sputtering and grasping for a reply. Keith follows Lance, eyes still wide in impressed surprise. It’s one thing to have that caustic tongue turned on him, it’s another entirely more entertaining thing to watch Lance eviscerate someone else. And if Keith is being honest with himself, he’s even beginning to enjoy their verbal sparring. It’s mentally stimulating, and it keeps Keith away from darker thoughts.

“I didn’t know you were that good at Pit-and-Sow.”

They’re walking to the back of the boat now. The day is cool for an Arusian summer, cooled even further by the blowing wind.

“I am good at most things.”

“Ah yes, there is that humility again.”

“Humility is too highly prized. I would much rather speak truth to skill.”

They stop at the guard-rail and Keith folds his arms against it, leans like he had the night prior. Lance leans back against the rail, elbows propped up on it in a rather lax posture. The river water is blue and shimmering. Keith thinks he can see some fish darting after the vessel.

“It was the first game I ever taught Romelle,” Keith says, not sure where the words come from. He says her name quietly, doesn’t want anyone to overhear them. “As soon as she stopped throwing the marbles at me, she started beating me.”

Lance huffs, something like a laugh. “Did Shiro teach you?” He says Shiro’s name quietly, as Keith had said Romelle’s.

“Yeah, he did,” Keith says, smiling. “We used to hold our games at the edge of the fountain in the middle of the lawn.”

“And when did you start beating him?”

“As soon as I stopped swallowing the marbles.”

That gets a proper laugh out of Lance, and Keith looks up, half-startled. Lance rolls his eyes. 

“Yes, I laugh too.”

“I don’t know  _ how  _ I’ve been deluded into thinking you’re a pompous, stoic ice-block.”

“Oh fuck off.”

They fall into a silence so comfortable Keith feels no need to fill it as he often does with people outside of his immediate family or circle of friends. He watches the vessel cut through river water, Lance a calm presence beside him. Keith finds himself monitoring his face out of the corner of his eye. His eyelashes are long, and his thick curls are dark against the brown skin of his high cheekbone.

“What did you like to do back home?” Keith finds himself asking.

Lance tenses, and for a moment Keith doesn’t think he will answer. Then he says,

“I spent a lot of time in the surrounding towns. I’ve always loved farming. Growing something, being the mainspring of a life. A bit selfish, I think.”

“There is nothing selfish about wanting to be a part of a life.”

Lance glances at him out of the corner of his eye, gives him a wry smile.

“You would say that.”

“What do you mean?” Keith asks, unsure if he should be offended.

“You see the world in glittering hues.”

“Plain speech, Lio.”

“You are an optimist. You are not afraid to hope for things.”

“And you are?”

Lance looks at him, blue gaze searching, like he’s attempting to do a mental calculus that 

he can’t quite get right. Then,

“Let’s go eat, Ren. You look three seconds away from diving overboard for a live fish.”

↡

Keith has that terrible dream again. It drives him up to the deck, again. It’s not a full moon, but the light is enough.

Lance is there when he wakes up in the morning. Fully dressed, perched on top of the table reading another book that he likely got from one of his new friends.

“Did I.. wake you last night?” Keith asks. 

“It is all right, princeling. It is to be expected, after the days you’ve had. Especially after the hunter in the tavern. You did what you had to with your life in immediate danger.”

Keith’s chest seizes as he remembers the man kneeling over Lance, the tube of Blacklight in his hand.

“My life was not in immediate danger.”

Lance frowns. “What do you mean?”

“He hadn’t… I mean he was sedating you when I… when I killed him. I did it for you.”

Keith expects a few different reactions to this. A clever, corrosive remark with something deeper buried inside it. Something frosty and brutal as Lance closes himself off again because he’s unsure of how to proceed.

He does not expect anger. Lance’s eyes flash, more white than blue, in his rage.

“For  _ me _ ? I am not some mile marker on your marathon to redemption—‘save the Belí’ and suddenly you are a better person? Like magic? Am I supposed to thank you? Am I supposed to  _ owe _ you? Because I swear to every single indifferent fucking deity—”

“What? No!  _ No _ . That is not  _ at all _ what I was thinking—”

“Then what  _ were  _ you thinking? You did not have to burden your conscience for me, I never  _ asked  _ you to—”

“I wasn’t!” Keith says, loud. It’s nearly a shout. Keith is sure the passengers in the neighboring rooms hear it, if they had somehow managed to miss everything else.

This brings Lance up short, irises darkening azure again.

“What?” Lance says.

Keith feels the sudden urge to reach out, to take Lance’s hand like he might if he was trying to reassure anyone else of something. But this is  _ Lance _ , so he sits up straighter on the bed and balls his fist in his lap.

“I wasn’t thinking. I was on the ground. I saw him on top of you. I did not _ let _ myself think about it.”

Lance’s face gives away nothing. He might as well be wearing a veil. A teetering silence falls, tense and yawning and uncomfortable. Lance does not look at him as he gets up from the table. He closes the book he was reading, sets it on the tabletop, and leaves the room.

↡

Lance avoids him for the entire day.

Keith doesn’t necessarily have concrete evidence that Lance is going out of his way to avoid him. But Lance would be clever enough to mask his evasions.

Lance spends the day playing Pit-and-Sow, playing singing games with the children on board, speaking and laughing (laughing!) with the women Keith had seen embracing against the guard-rail on the first day of travelling. Lance even spends some time with the captain, gets friendly enough with him that the man allows Lance to balance the magpie on his arm. The bird seems particularly fascinated by Lance’s hair, and Lance laughs as it butts its head against a curl near his ear.

Keith spends the day playing dominoes with some men, sneaking glances across the boat to observe all of this.

That night, Keith retires before Lance does. He falls asleep without issue. But he has a new dream where Shiro and Romelle are laying supine in Melenor’s Eden. They are under two orange blossom trees, and their skin is cracked and peeling. Their flesh starts to crumble and flake away like plaster.

Keith jerks awake, prepared to leave the bed and slip above deck for the light. But he feels a weight across his body.

Lance has an arm over Keith’s stomach. He cannot see Lance’s face when he turns to look, but he feels his warmth. Lance’s head is tucked against his shoulder, curls a soft cushion against his bare skin. Keith feels like he could cry. So he does, tears streaking wet down his cheeks. It is silent, but Keith’s body trembles with the force.

And Lance shifts closer. And Lance holds him tighter.

↡

Neither of them mentions it the following morning.

Keith wakes up when Lance stirs, hair rubbing against his shoulder. Keith lays perfectly still, like one might under a capricious bear. Lance rolls out of the bed without looking at him, and Keith watches him. Lance goes to the table, starts to wet a washcloth with his back to Keith. His tattoos look much more delicate in the morning light, like they might rip under a rough hand. Keith knows better.

“So you’re up,” Lance says evenly, back still to Keith.

“Thank you,” Keith says.

The muscles of Lance’s back stiffen, then relax. He hums in wordless acknowledgement.

Keith has gotten so used to the chirrupping of the magpie in the early morning that he notices the sound’s absence immediately. He doesn’t think much of it though.

They’re getting closer to Feyiv now, only about a day and a half left. 

“Have you been to Feyiv before?” Lance asks as they sit on some crates above deck, watching tree after identical tree pass them by.

A memory rushes through Keith, of a long fall afternoon spent in one of Feyiv’s many brothels. He wills himself not to blush. 

“Yes.”

Lance picks up on his embarrassment immediately. His eyes light up with mirth, because he may not be evil in the way that Keith originally thought, but he’s definitely devious.

“Oh my. Are you familiar with The Honeypot, by any chance?” Lance is smiling, endlessly amused. 

Feyiv is a fairly small town, by Arusian standards. But it’s home to several different brothels. They are very well frequented, considering their proximity to the military outpost.

Keith  _ has  _ been to Feyiv before, on a trip with his same-age cousin Matthew (and their guards; it was an entire caravan). It was meant to be a simple tour of the base, but of course Matt roped Keith into visiting one of the bordellos. The Honeypot is really as expensive as a brothel can get. It is frequented by nobles, royalty, rich merchants and other people of status. The top-earners are so wealthy that they own their own carriages.

Keith did not lose his virginity at The Honeypot (he’d already lost it years ago by that point), but he did pick up several fascinating tricks. He feels himself flush harder at the memories, and it becomes impossible for him to will the blush away entirely. Lance’s smile widens.

“Why do you know about The Honeypot?” Keith blurts, and realizes how foolish it sounds as soon as he says it.

Lance rolls his eyes. “Everybody knows about The Honeypot. What was it again? Ah, yes.  _ Whores as pretty as a Belí _ . Well? Can you confirm?”

“That does not deserve a response.”

“You prude.”

Lance is the first to pick up on the smell of smoke.

The smile vanishes from his face as his nose twitches. Lance stands and turns,

attention pulled to something ahead of them on the bank. Keith rises too and goes to look.

On the right, several thick plumes of black smoke reel towards the clear blue sky, as imposing as buildings even from this distance. The smoke is several miles inland, and Keith can make out some of the fire too, bursting bigger as it catches more dry bark and gods-know- what-else.

“Is it…?” Keith asks, hopes that Lance knows he’s talking about dragonfire.

“No,” Lance says. “This is regular fire.”

Lance frowns. He looks disturbed by something. 

“This is a Belitian counter-attack,” Lance says. “Which means that the Order has already struck Ekrim.”

↡

There are more plumes the further north they go.

Keith knows that there are smaller Arusian villages on the road to Feyiv. He feels suddenly breathless with the anger that consumes him. These are not the unmoving woodcut impressions of history book pages, these are not secondhand accounts bolting from mouth to mouth in a hot rush until they’re ultimately committed to paper in distorted form.

This is real, and it is happening right in front of Keith.

The Belí did this.

He looks at every single column of smoke, every single jerking tongue of flame, even though his eyes water with it.

And at first, he revisits his original hatred of the Belí. His original distrust. His original suspicion. It is comfortable and familiar and still-warm, and welcomes him home like he is a prodigal son.

But he keeps looking, beyond the trees. Tracking the thrashing pillars of smoke and flame to the sky, where they blotch clouds as they bow together almost-black. 

The Belí did this, yes, but not without reason. Not without provocation from the Order. 

When Keith turns his attention back to the boat Lance has disappeared from his side. He hears a familiar lilting  _ chirruup _ sound coming from behind him. When he turns around he sees Lance speaking to the captain with all of his usual stoicism, and finds that the magpie is back. The bird is perched on the captain’s arm, with a small roll of parchment in its beak. 

The captain removes the roll of parchment from the bird’s beak, and Keith can tell from this distance that it’s actually two pieces of paper. The captain says something and Lance nods slowly as he reads over the words on the first leaf. The captain reveals the second leaf once they’re done perusing through the first and… 

Anyone else might miss it, but Keith is not anyone else. 

Lance’s face remains impassive. But Keith notices the twitch at the corner of his mouth, like Keith always does. Lance nods slowly again, says something to the captain that has him laughing so hard the magpie lets out an indignant squawk at his sudden movement.

With a nod to the captain, Lance is walking over to Keith. When he reaches him he tilts his head up to whisper into Keith’s ear,

“We need to go below deck. Now.”

↡

As soon as the door to their room closes, Lance asks,

“Where is your dagger?”

Keith reaches under his pillow and pulls it out. Lance takes it from him, draws his thumb along the flat of the blade with an appraising eye.

“No. This is not sharp enough.”

“I know at least one person who would beg to differ,” Keith mutters bitterly. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“Sit.”

Keith goes to sit on the bed, but Lance tuts at him.

“No, sit on the ground.”

Keith raises a brow, but the hard look on Lance’s face brooks no argument. He sits, with his shoulder blades against the edge of the bed. Lance climbs onto the mattress and arranges himself so that he’s sitting behind Keith with his feet flat against the ground, knees on either side of Keith’s shoulders. Lance speaks calmly, and they’re so close that Keith can feel the vibrations of his voice.

“Since we left the Capital, I have been wondering about the Order’s objective. They detest the Belí more than most Arusians do, maybe as much as the Elves do. But I originally believed that that hatred would do nothing more than fuel the extant Arusian desire to conquer our lands. I was wrong.”

Keith feels a sharp edge at the nape of his neck, sharper than the dagger. It’s warm against his skin, warmer than any blade has the right to be once it has left the forge. 

It is one of Lance’s transformed tattoos.

Keith is perhaps far less anxious than he should be. He sits perfectly still, so curious to see what Lance will do that his heart is beating hard behind his ribs, solid  _ ba-dumps  _ that make his entire chest feel like it’s pulsing.

“This is not meant to be a war. It is meant to be a clearing. They mean to wipe out all of us, princeling.” The words chill Keith to his core. “Babes, children, everyone. We are a grave mortal threat, did you know? We must be neutralized.”

Keith feels it tingling in his fingers when Lance drags the edge of his tattoo blade, sharper than any razor, up from his nape to the base of his skull. Feels it when the cut hair falls and scatters under the collar of his shirt to leave his skin itchy. He still doesn’t know what this has to do with the repulsive planned genocide Lance is telling him about, but he doesn’t stop it. It feels too important. 

Ever since he was young people have often admired how his hair frames his face, so he’s kept it nearly shoulder-length for as long as he can remember. He has been afraid of what he might look like, how his face might warp and twist, if he cuts it short. A simple fear. Having Lance shear his hair short now brings him back to that place of sweet, uncomplicated fear. Weightless panic with no barbed poison, no history, no dead bodies.

“Where do you think the Order struck first?” Keith asks as Lance keeps cutting. 

“The lowlands. Their goal is to kill, so they will start with the people who are immediately within reach. Farmers, laborers, craftsmen. The people who my family ignore.” Lance’s voice wavers a bit here, but his hand does not slip. He’s nearly at the crown of Keith’s head now. He’s not shaving Keith bald, only shortening the hair. His voice is as steady as before when he continues.

“The captain’s magpie brought this news from a village near Tarrin. The Order calls it a declaration of war, but it is nothing but a statement of intention. That is not the only notice the bird came back with though.”

Lance tilts Keith’s head forward to get at a difficult patch. His hand is gentle, fingers slender and sure.

“What else did it come back with?” Keith asks, but he already has an inkling. Random drunkards in a Tarrinian tavern were aware of his escape from the palace only two days after it happened. There’s no telling how far news of his disappearance has spread to everyone else on the Arusian mainland in the time since.

“Your wanted poster.”

“Just mine.”

“Yes.”

“But none of the portraits at the palace actually look like me.” 

“No. The Order must have had someone from your court describe your features to an artist. Forced precision from both parties under strong threat.”

“But how can you know all of this?”

“Because the rendering on the poster I saw looks like your mirror reflection.”

Keith swallows. “It is accurate?”

“Very. Now hold still.”

“Why don’t you have a wanted poster?”

“They are probably working on it as we speak, or attempting to. It does not surprise me that it would take longer. I did not spend nearly as much time with anyone at your palace as you did. It would be a great deal more difficult for them to describe me with perfect clarity.”

It is a perfectly reasonable theory, but Keith is having a hard time imagining that anyone would have a difficult time describing a face as remarkable as Lance’s.

Lance works quickly. Several moments later he has reached the top of Keith’s head. Keith expects him to cut the strands there too, but he only trims them. They’re longer than the rest of his hair. Lance tilts his head this way and that, passes over the base of his neck a few more times. Keith barely feels the blade, but he has the proof of its efficacy drifting to the ground beside him, fluttering down the back of his short tunic.

Then Lance pulls the blade away.

“Wait here.”

He scoots back, gets up off of the mattress, and leaves the room. Keith dusts some hair from his lap. Lance returns a few minutes later, with a small circular compact. He crouches down in front of Keith and opens the compact to reveal a mirror. He holds it up.

Keith’s eyes widen as he looks at himself. He reaches a hand up to drag fingers through the shorn hair at the side of his head, then through the longer hair at the top, where it hangs over his forehead. He can’t help but think that he looks a little bit like Shiro with this style.

“You are… very good at this.”

Lance’s smile is short-lived.

Keith surprises himself when he reaches out a hand and rests it on Lance’s knee. Lance tenses, but doesn’t move away.  _ I will not let anything happen to your people _ strikes Keith as insultingly patronizing, and wrong besides. He wagers that plenty has already happened to Lance’s people. So instead he says,

“We are going to end this, Lance. Shiro and Romelle and I.”

Lance says nothing for a moment, powder blue gaze fixed on Keith. His body does not untense, but he looks down at the hand Keith still has on his knee. His brows knit a bit, like he’s struggling with something.

Then he rises, Keith’s hand falls from his leg. He says, right before he leaves,

“Clean this mess up. I wager there is enough hair here to make a second mattress.”

↡

It happens twice more.

That night Keith startles from that same dream of Melenor’s Eden to find Lance’s arm against his stomach, his head against his shoulder. 

The following day he hears some of the men talking about how the Order has been parading around the dead bodies of the monarchs in the streets of the Capital, to prove that they have truly been deposed. Keith goes so weak he has to sit down on a crate, and Lance brings him a cup of water. He hears too that many of the southern Arusian provinces are still loyal, owing in no small part to the military presence there, but the north’s support is waning. The Order has their ear on the subject of the former court’s “tolerance of the Belí.” They hate the Belí enough to turn coat. Lance had said it, hadn’t he? That Keith had no idea just how much Arusians hate these people?

That night he does not dream, but he does snap alert when Lance shakes him awake.

“You were screaming,” Lance murmurs. 

Keith does not know what to say.

“Oh.”

“Try to stay up for a bit,” Lance says. “The deck should—”

“No,” Keith says, settling against his pillow and exhaling as his mind fully registers Lance’s smooth arm across his ribs.

“No?”

“I would stay here.”

Somebody yells from down the hall, 

“If he makes you scream like  _ that  _ then yer one lucky motherfucker!” 

Lance responds, because of course he does,

“Give me about two feet of steel and you could sound even better!”

“Well aren’t  _ you  _ a depraved little flower?” careens back to them through the darkness, and Keith snickers. It takes less time than he’d expected for him to fall asleep again.

They arrive at the river port in Feyiv the next day.

They have not seen a column of smoke nor a roiling fire for miles now. The entire previous day passed without a single sighting. The sky is the clear uninterrupted blue of robin eggs. Keith can see the towers of the Feyivi military base, tremendous windowed pillars the waning white of aged bone. Vines that run the length of the mortar between bricks like leaking green marrow.

When the boat sets against the bank, a little girl with skin an even deeper brown than Lance’s hugs his leg as they prepare to disembark. They’re near the sail when the boat pulls in. She looks like she’s about to cry. Lance looks to her mother for permission and waits for her nod of confirmation before he picks the little girl up.

“Cyna, what color are my eyes?” Lance asks. 

Keith is struck by how different he sounds here, unlike any tone he has ever heard Lance use. It is sweet and completely without artifice. Entirely open.

The little girl wipes her wet eyes with a dimpled fist. She can’t be older than three.

“Blue,” she says.

“And what color is the sky?”

“Blue,” she says again.

“Then whenever you see a blue sky, I want you to remember how surprised I looked when you beat me at Pit-and-Sow. Okay?”

“Yes,” Cyna says, still sniffling.

“ _ Okay? _ ” Lance asks again, tickling Cyna’s side with his free hand.

Cyna giggles, then laughs wholesale. It’s such an adorable sound that Keith finds himself smiling too.

“Yes!”

Lance hands the child back to her mother, and he and Keith descend the gangplank.

The trees on the bank are scant, and the path from the port feeds directly into the single road into town. 

Keith sees the brick-and-mortar shop of the weaver at the entrance to Feyiv. Her huge portrait windows are just as Keith remembers them. Her sheer lavender curtains are just as striking against the plain gray brick of her store’s exterior, pulled aside to let in the breeze.

And, pulled aside as they are, Keith gets a perfect view of the black-armored guard who steps into the shop while the weaver is at her loom. He brings out a leaflet and shows it to her. She tucks a loc behind her ear and shakes her head.

Lance must have noticed the guard at the same time, because he reaches for Keith’s arm just as Keith reaches for his.They disappear under the cover of neighboring trees while the other passengers stream into Feyiv. 

Feyiv has a very forthright layout. One road leads into the town from the south, and one of the two roads that leads out towards the north will take you directly to the military outpost. There are not many winding streets in the town itself. It is not a place that plays coy, though the prostitutes at the brothels might.

All of this to say that Keith finds it  _ very  _ ironic that the woods beside the town are some of the most confusing in all of Arus. He and Lance are not twenty feet away from the main Feyivi road before they’re being twisted about by curling paths. Every break in the trees looks the exact same, right down to the drops of harsh sunlight that plummet to the leaves under their feet like birds shot mid-flight. 

It is disorienting at first. Though Keith is a native to this country, Lance is the one who figures out their directional relationship with the soaring towers of the base. Keith trusts him with this, of course (he has seen what that mind and those instincts are capable of), but out of simple curiosity he asks him how he knows. Lance immediately delves into a mathematical explanation that nearly makes Keith’s eyes cross. 

“In short,” Lance says, amused, “I have a very good sense of direction.”

“Could it not have come into play about ten minutes ago?”

“My mind had to calibrate to the then-unfamiliar surroundings. Do you not warm up your muscles before you prance off to lose your sword fights?”

“I am tempted to leave you here.”

“I am tempted to let you.”

They walk with purpose now. Every turn they take is deliberate, every twist around an old oak intentional. 

Lance seems completely in his element. So unlike any royal Keith has ever observed in the woods, even those who’ve grown accustomed to it after years and years of hunting. Even Shiro. Lance moves with an ease of body, a simple grace, that makes it seem like the wood itself is surrendering to him. Thick, rough tree branches suddenly made tractable, dangerous overgrown roots made so honest that they announce their presence before either man has the chance to trip. Keith remembers that Lance is an earth elemental, and it all makes sense. Keith feels immeasurably safe here, safer than he has anywhere in a while (even his mind). And he has the sudden thought, popping at the base of his skull like cooking oil under heat, that this feeling is too lovely not to share. He would like to make Lance feel this too, safe somewhere. It would be fair. An exchange.

The trees begin to thin, and Lance stops, his arm blocking Keith’s path.

“Smoke,” he says.

When Keith looks up he sees it in the distance. Tin-gray smoke ribbons up past the canopy of trees.

Feyiv is surrounded by a number of smaller farming villages. Their nearness to one now indicates to Keith that the winding path they’re taking to the outpost has likely shifted them due west. Keith has ridden through a couple, and though the people were nothing but amicable (probably owing in no small part to Keith’s station), Keith could always tell that they preferred to keep to themselves. It was in the way the houses all faced each other, the way that their grins were too exuberant to be genuine. 

There are no discernable pathways in this part of the wood except for the one that leads down, then potentially through, the nearby farming village. Lance seems to realize the same thing. It would appear that neither of them is willing to test the deceptive potential of Keith’s new haircut, not when this guard has an accurate rendering of Keith’s face in hand. Keith follows Lance through the break in the trees.

They have to be careful about this, Keith knows. There are guards searching for them in Feyiv; there might be men probing the surrounding settlements too.

They reach the village and they stop. Keith hears Lance’s sharp intake of breath.

The fire tore through quick, Keith thinks.

The path that cuts directly through the village is nothing but a crooked road overgrown with leathery weeds. Except for two buildings of stone near the back and a chapel to Amanza the Goddess of the Dawn at the center (and even these two buildings are half-crumbled; the chapel is still on fire, sending smoke into the air), there is not a single structure left standing. There are blackened squares of ash and rubble where Keith surmises houses used to be. From where Keith is standing he can make out the vague shapes of bodies, now far beyond recognition, in the burnt mess of things.

He thinks that he’s going to be sick but his stomach settles, and he feels nothing but this stinging sorrow, like he has finally seen for himself a sadness that devours all sense. 

They walk down the road with their shoulders almost touching. Keith tries to keep his head forward, towards the break in the trees at the back of the village, but his attention is constantly pulled by discrete units of the devastation—broken pottery at the doorway, a standing cauldron that is all that is left of a household, the stray wheel of a handcart beside a destroyed house.

They are nearly at the back of the village, walking past the chapel (the fire is waning now, succumbing to the tenacity of the stone), when Lance stops.

Lance’s body goes completely still, then he is heading straight for the chapel’s doorway.

Keith sees what Lance sees now. There’s a bare arm sticking out from inside the chapel, resting limp over the threshold. An arm with winding black tattoos, pale and unburnt. 

A Belí.

Lance stops just inside of the structure. Keith cannot see the rest of the Belí’s body but he can see how Lance’s face changes. 

In his mind, Keith is being thrashed around by memory. His parents, quiet and still in their beds. The doctors, sorry though Keith is beginning to think they did not have to be. The way it felt like he had snapped a bone, though he did not have the benefit of observable proof: a lump under the skin, purpled discoloration. 

There is no reason for Keith to get any closer to the form laying limp just inside the chapel. He cannot. He should not. 

But he looks at Lance’s profile, sees the work of his throat as he swallows rapidly against this most damaging assail to his composure, and Keith begins to walk.

When he gets to the doorway he cannot look at the form on the ground at first, only registers out of the corner of his eye the blood staining the back of their shirt red. They’re clad in the same brown pants and white tunic Lance had worn on his first day at the palace. The simple unadorned garb of a commoner (Keith understands that now), an ascetic symbol for the Order. Likely a symbol of solidarity with the lower classes for Lance. An accidental similarity.

Keith knows that all Belí are trained in combat in their adolescence (as confirmed by Lance back on the boat, during one of their frequent nighttime conversations). Many of the Belí who do not officially join the Ekrimian fighting force are just as fierce and skilled as the “proper” warriors. 

But the proper warriors have on armor when they run into close-combat situations (on the rare occasions where they do). Once Keith catches a glimpse of the form, he cannot stop looking at it and its surroundings. Keith notices a broken bow nearby. 

This Belí was sent into this village with no protection, barely armed. Why?

Keith can tell that there are more bodies inside the chapel, but he cannot bring himself to look at them. So he looks at Lance.

Keith does not touch Lance. After their tense moment back on the boat when he’d tried to comfort Lance about this bloodshed with a hand on his knee, he does not think it would be well-received. 

Lance keeps his gaze on the form, and Keith watches his face. His bottom lip is trembling, but it seems to Keith that he is making a concerted effort to not blink. To not look away. Keith wonders where this compulsion to self-flagellate comes from.

Lance takes a deep, deep breath. Then he turns and walks out, past Keith.

Keith follows Lance around the chapel. Lance braces a hand against one of the still-standing walls, his back to Keith. 

Keith can clearly see the towers of the military outpost from here. About half a mile ahead, if he had to guess. The forest is too loud around them, birds chirping, animals rushing around in the undergrowth. 

“Ekrim and Arus produced this alliance without the input of their masses,” Lance says, “it was never for them. Few things in either of our countries ever are. We have that in common.”

Keith recalls his father’s words.  _ Explicit reinforcement of difference. Masses bow to power _ .

“Yes,” Keith says, “we do.”

“One more war. Not too long ago, I wanted one more war. I thought that if Ekrim rose up against your country again, if it was sudden, if it was swift, we would win. We would finally do away with this empty accord, this terrible joke of an exchange. And  _ when  _ we won, because I did not doubt for a moment that we would, not until— Well, you know.”

“I believed that  _ when _ we won, when Ekrim was finally rid of the standing threat that your state poses, my people would turn their ferocity inward and destroy my family’s regime. Carve out a country for themselves. I was so sure they would. When families cannot pay their taxes the Belitian court keeps their children in the dungeons until they can. Did you know that? No, likely not. And I am glad for it.”

Lance straightens up and turns to look at Keith. His face is wiped carefully blank.

“I wanted one more war so badly that I was even willing to start one myself.”

There’s a wind rushing through the trees that bracket the village. Keith has to strain to hear Lance, over the noise of the chattering leaves and the rushing of blood in his head. His mouth moves as Lance’s does, in a silent mime of his words. Because he knows what Lance is about to say.

“Melenor’s Eden,” Lance says, Keith imitates.

And the portion of Keith that still holds, might always hold, the Belí in a light of mistrust and suspicion shouts,  _ yes! _

“The day that the maid Corina found me collapsed in the garden, I was there because I wanted to see how I might scale the wall. I wanted to see what it would take for me to break into the rooms of the Arusian monarchs.”

Lance does not say  _ your parents _ , and Keith, in a sick way, is glad for it. He is sure his knees would buckle under him otherwise.

“You would have killed them.”

“Yes.”

Then Keith remembers, hears it clear and steady like it’s streaming into him from some other place,

_ “Turn this room upside down if you want. Uproot every single pretty little flower in that garden. You will find nothing.” _

With a sickening awareness like morning nausea, Keith’s eyes fall to Lance’s arm, covered by the sleeve of his tunic now. Of course no one would have found a hidden weapon if they’d searched, either in the garden or in Lance’s guest rooms. Not with the weapon (“ _ weapons, _ ” Keith’s mind amends) stamped into his skin. 

“The guards,” Keith says. It is a question, but he refuses to phrase it as such because he refuses to request anything of Lance, now or ever.

“I can be very persuasive,” Lance says, and his eyes flash bright white, no blue iris or black pupil. It is only for half a second, but in that beat Keith feels his muscles go lax and his mind go coaxable.

“You would have killed them,” Keith says again, voice stronger now. It hardly sounds like him. It sounds a bit like his father. Like the voice of a king.

“Yes.”

Keith feels the rage that he is familiar with surging up again, and something like betrayal trails it, though that’s impossible. He has not known Lance nearly long enough for that. But this time, he does not rush to hit Lance. This time he does not feel the distinct compulsion to wrap his hands around his neck and squeeze. 

“You killed them,” Keith says, another question he refuses to phrase as such.

“No.” Lance’s voice is firm. He does not look away when he says it. 

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I think you want to. I think you want to lean into the truth you know. I did not do this, Keith.”

Keith is still testing the weight of his rage when he notices the direction of Lance’s gaze. Lance is observing the spot at Keith’s side where he knows the dagger from the tavern is tucked in Keith’s waistband. He doesn’t appear as though he’s going to grab for it. Honestly, he looks like he’s wondering if Keith will. 

“Through the trees beyond lay the outpost. Go to your brother, find your sister, and—”

“Do  _ not  _ command me.”

Lance nods once. Keith thinks he hears two squirrels playing in the tree closest to them.

“We will end this because it is the right thing to do,” Keith says. “I owe you nothing.”

He finally has control over his legs again, so he walks forward, towards the town road. Lance doesn’t say a word as Keith passes him. When Keith is a few feet away, he doesn’t turn back as he says to Lance,

“Your identification with your commoners is a delusion. You could have them put to death at any moment, if you wished. That is no basis for friendship.”

Lance makes a sound, like the beginning of a word. But he stops himself, and says nothing. 

↡

Keith can tell by Shiro’s watch that it takes him ten minutes to reach the base.

He cannot believe how easy of a walk it is. Even the birds and squirrels are quieter. Keith feels a singing relief with every step he takes. He’s going to see Shiro. Then he swallows. Shiro has likely heard what has happened. A strange, self-serving part of Keith is glad of this. He is glad that he will not be the one who has to give Shiro the news. 

But as he approaches the towers, observes them from the cover of the trees, he can tell that something is off.

There are no soldiers stationed above the entrance, as there customarily are. All three portcullises are drawn up, and through the tunnel Keith can see into the dirt courtyard. He sees the well he’d tripped over and nearly fallen into during a friendly spar with one of the soldiers some years ago; he’d gotten even closer to falling in when he’d jumped onto the lip of the well to avoid the jab of the soldier’s sword, an irregular move so out of step with any of the technique he’s been taught that it makes him think of Lance (to his dismay). 

He has the sudden impulse to leap from his shelter of leaves, to sprint straight into the structure. But he holds himself back. 

They could’ve written  _ enter here and be captured, fugitive prince  _ in the stones over the entrance and it would have been a less obvious trap.

Keith frees his dagger from his waistband as he considers his options. He will need it no matter what.

He could strike out on his own, try to find some way to the island of Krell. Krell has always been supremely loyal to the court of his mother and father, and it is technically independent of Arus. He might be safe.  _ If _ he could make it there, and though  _ he  _ might be safe, he would not be able to guarantee the safety of his siblings. Nor does he think that Krell’s troops alone would be enough to recapture the throne.

He could turn back and search for Lance. They could cross over into Ekrim together. Then what? Lance had tried to murder his parents to instigate a war. Keith could not stand to look at him right now.

So Keith returns to the only option that was ever really an option—find Shiro now. His brother could be hurt, or worse. 

He looks up at the towers, at the high, dark windows he cannot see into. Maybe the point is to simply lure him out into the open, in front of the drawn portcullises, so they can deliver the killing blow from a distance. Maybe that’s not the point at all, and they will attempt to dispose of him once he crosses the threshold of the base. Speculation will never give him the definitive answers he would truly be comfortable enough with to make a decision with full confidence.

So he makes a run for it.

He does not feel anything pierce his flesh as he dashes across the yards of open green. He ducks under the first portcullis and immediately plasters himself to the wall of the tunnel, his back right up against the stones.

He side-steps as slowly as he can, the dagger tight in his grasp. He’s never handled one so extensively before. He tries to ignore how natural it feels in his hand.

He’s sweating so much that he knows, if his hair was still long, it would be glued to the sticky skin of his neck and temples. He passes the second portcullis. Breathes. He reaches the third and final portcullis far too soon, it seems. He takes a deeper breath once he reaches the end of the tunnel, the curved edge. He looks out.

The balconies are completely empty from what Keith can see. The breezeways are vacant too. This is unusual to say the very least. It is the middle of the day. There should be soldiers running drills in the middle of the courtyard, soldiers fucking around. Soldiers. 

Keith knows that he must enter the building itself next to search for Shiro, and he is preparing to do just that when he hears a pained groan.

When he turns his attention back to the center of the courtyard, he notices a man propped up against the wall of the well. He has a hand held against the wound in his side gushing blood.

This could be some sort of trick. It probably is. He should not be driven by a helpless impulse to offer his aid, but he is. He’s also in dire need of information; he needs to know why this base seems like it’s been abandoned. He needs to know where Shiro is. 

The man is dressed in the military-issue underarmor of Feyiv’s standing troops, so it sets Keith’s mind at ease a bit. 

It does not matter that the man’s wound, discoloring his padded underarmour the kind of red one finds in dyeing tubs, looks far too serious for Keith to be of any genuine assistance. Keith’s foremost instinct is to go to the man, to discern whether he can be of any help. So Keith peers around the wall he leans against. When he sees nothing he rushes over, eyes scoping out the winding balcony and the looping breezeway as much as he can. 

He kneels before the figure. The man’s face is colorless, and the hand that he has over his wound is going limp from blood loss.

“Here, let me,” Keith says. He moves the man’s hand and replaces it with his own. He applies as much pressure as he can, and the man laughs, a weak, splintering thing.

“Would tha’ you’d arrived twenty minutes ago,” the man says. “I’d still have mos’ of the blood where it’s ‘posed to be.” 

Keith looks into the man’s cloudy eyes, murky with waning focus. A moment passes between them. The man’s blood runs slower between Keith’s fingers, and the man smirks. Something so familiar it is startling, something that instantly draws Keith back to that moment in front of the tavern window. That guard recognizing him as he struggled to leave with Lance.

He glances up and notices the cauliflower ear just as he feels a searing punch right under his ribs. Only the heat holds, like his flesh is a pouch quickly filling with pit-roasted kernels. When he glances down he sees the hilt of a dagger, and the briefest sliver of a black blade, sticking out of the meat below his chest as his own shirt grows dark. 

It seems the Order did not limit themselves to luxite long-swords.

Keith is scrabbling for his own dagger with stiff graceless fingers when the man twists the blade inside him and says, his own breathing labored,

“Told those bastards you’d come here, pretty prince… they acted like they were just humorin’ me but my plan worked perfect… missed your brother, huh? Other soldiers should be comin’ to get your head, soon as I send out the signal—”

Keith catches a flash of movement in his periphery. The man throws something towards his left with his other hand, but he doesn’t have the chance to finish his sentence. Keith is driving his own dagger through the bared throat that he finds, just as the man shifts his blade up further to pierce a lung. Keith feels like he’s breathing with half a chest. There is a terrible moment of overlay, where Keith sees the face of the hunter instead of Cauliflower Ear. The same beard, the same watery eyes. The man’s grip on his dagger loosens, he gurgles, then stills. Keith frees his blade from the weeping throat. The man’s head tips forward, and his body slumps to the side but does not fall.

Keith’s still kneeling. He knows that he should keep the blade in to minimize damage. His own dagger is in his other hand, and he tries to stand but his legs are too weak, quickly getting weaker. All he can think is that there is not as much pain as there should be. It hurts— _ Gods  _ does it hurt—but he should be in agony, he should be writhing, he should be screaming. 

Instead he’s crawling across the dirt, towards the breezeway. Trying to get his crumpling body to cooperate, to let him  _ turn  _ so that he can sight the entrance tunnel. 

He will  _ not  _ die here.

That’s when he figures out what Cauliflower Ear had thrown. That’s when he sees angry flame bursting against the pillars of a breezeway. It is unlike any fire Keith has ever seen. It seems to stomp, to canter, to climb the walls of the outdoor hallway with human fingers.

These idiots. This fire signal will burn Keith beyond recognition long before any of the nearby Marmora guards have a chance to get to him.

In a moment’s time a column of fire has climbed the three stories of the structure to lap at the open air above the roof. It can be seen from the river, from the surrounding villages, from the outer edge of Feyiv and beyond, Keith’s sure of it.

Keith turns on his knees, fingers growing so weak he nearly loses his grip on both the daggers, and crawls towards the entrance tunnel on a single elbow. The tunnel is constricting. Any more of this and it will be as small as a puncture wound, impossible to fit through. No, that’s Keith’s vision, rimming black. 

The fire lapping at the outpost’s walls has turned its attention inward, to the courtyard. Keith feels the terrible heat behind him, but he keeps going, his own warm blood leaking around the hand he still has on the dagger in his side.

He feels it when the first bit of flame wraps lips around his ankle; it feels just like the heat of his dagger wound, but freer. Sees it when a figure runs into the courtyard through the tunnel, curly-haired and brown-skinned. Hears it when a voice he’s certain should be set to harp music yells,  _ Keith! _

He is slipping into a valley of delirium where impossible things are packed against each other like sand on a beach. Here is how he knows:

He has certainly lost most of the skin on his left leg now. A line of fire stripes across the courtyard, right in front of Keith, and walls him off from Lance. He sees the top of that curly head bobbing as Lance continues his advance, and Keith wants to shout at him to leave. To go back. He has this frenzied, juvenile thought— _ it’s not safe here _ .

Lance walks through the fire. It burns most of his clothes instantly. But Lance is completely untouched. His tattoos, both the ones on his arms and the ones on his legs, are forming thick whips and chords around him; they stretch beyond Keith’s limited circle of vision. His eyes are glowing near-white, and his curls are blowing around his head with the force of the growing flame. If Keith didn’t know any better, he would say that the flames are growing stronger because of him. If Keith didn’t know any better, he would say that there is the faintest shadow of a white dragon head the size of two wheeled wagons right behind Lance.

He is beautiful. He is so beautiful it is beyond comprehension.

Breathing becomes an excessive burden, so Keith stops. The last thing Keith sees, before everything goes dark, is the widening of Lance’s eyes, the worried curve of his mouth, as he falls to his knees before him.

↡

Lance’s healing abilities were not suspicious at first. 

Plenty of earth elementals have healing powers. And, as far as anyone knows (except for his cousin Allura), Lance is an earth elemental. 

But if that were the truth, Arus would be down one bull-headed princeling, and Lance would be bare-assed at the center of a hostile military outpost for nothing.

Earth elementals can instantly remedy injuries that a body would be able to (much more slowly) heal on its own. Ether users, like Lance, are able to repair wounds that would be fatal otherwise. Lance is the only living ether user as far as he and Allura know, and he’s never had to put his abilities to such extreme practice. But when he sees Keith, senses how deep his attacker has driven the dagger, Lance knows that that is exactly what he will have to do. 

After Keith disappeared beyond the trees, Lance stood beside that crumbling chapel till his legs grew so stiff it felt like someone had planted him in the dirt outside it. He had not planned on surviving his trip to Arus. And he had not planned on Keith. 

It is in Lance’s nature (he has made sure of it) to keep his thoughts and actions separate and to only allow them to affiliate as circumstance dictates.

Keith has never had to do this, Lance thinks. He is nothing but nude impulse, a nerve without a corporeal system to answer to. It seems to Lance that Keith finds it difficult to even control his facial expressions, a more benign but no less revealing indication of his bend towards instinct. He couldn’t even muster the friendly (or even neutral) countenance of a statesman when Lance rode into the palace. Lance has seen lying toddlers wear less emotion on their faces. He looked equal parts stunned and disgusted. Lance had almost laughed. 

Keith’s impulsiveness is corrosive. It gnaws at the mind-to-body wiring Lance has so carefully arranged, till his thoughts are knocking into his actions. Till he’s agreeing to childish spars in full view of Arusian youth who’d gladly flay him for the chance to have a shirtless Keith chase them around with a sword. Till he’s using his tattoos in public to drag Keith down to the tunnels as his palace is overrun. Till he’s agreeing to help him to Feyiv, to ride a splintering river boat. Till he’s tamping down his unkind sense-memories to comfort him in the night, because Lance knows what it is like to lose both parents at once.

Till some time after Keith has disappeared beyond the trees to run into the Feyivi base— _ alone _ , on the chance that it has somehow remained uncaptured even with Marmoran guards in the city it overlooks—Lance is turning to follow him. 

Lance is only a few minutes down the path when he catches the smell of smoke on the wind. But it smells much sharper than regular smoke, holds an acrid undercurrent that no living Belí should be able to discern. Only creatures with at least one full-blooded dragon parent are able to detect dragon fire by scent alone.

Lance, by virtue of his mother, catches the subtlety. 

He can also tell that this blaze will be the size of something produced by a dragon just entering its teen years. It would not be able to raze entire cities, like the firebreath of a fully grown adult would, but it will certainly destroy any structure in its immediate vicinity. And anything inside of it.

Lance runs. 

It will not do to have one of the royal Arusian brats dying before they can help him end the Order’s monstrous campaign.

His mood becomes near-frantic, and it agitates the wood around him. A panicked branch whips him in the face, but he shakes it off and keeps moving till he’s reached the end of the wood. 

He reaches the outpost, and only gives himself a few seconds to absorb the sight before him: unbroken flame cropping up from the courtyard like a man lifting himself from a tub, portcullises hiked up like skirts, and a dark-haired figure crawling across the dirt. 

Lance would usually take more time to observe his surroundings. He should be calmer. But these are thoughts he has while he’s already streaking across the green, while he’s already rushing through the tunnel. The smoke fits inside his lungs better than clean air does. There’s a body propped up against the wall of a well near the back of the courtyard, its throat slit. The man has a crumpled ear that looks like it’s been burned, and it reminds Lance so acutely of the soldiers he’d burned on the border all those years ago, after they’d kept him captive for days, that he must scrape his nails against the tunnel wall until they break to haul himself back to the present.

And at the center of it all is Keith, folded over in the dirt with a dagger in his side, his face as white as bleached stone. There is so much blood. An ever-growing red blotch runs from the bottom of his chest to his stomach, like he’d been in the direct path of an overturned wine goblet. Lance has no clue how he is still moving. When Keith somehow finds the strength to tilt his head up, his wide dark eyes are cloudy and confused and Lance is bounding forward again. Lance thinks he shouts something, it is so tremulous as it inches up his throat that it stings.

Though Lance can tell that the blaze began at the back of the courtyard near the well, fire is an over-familiar element that goes whoever it wishes. Dragon fire even more so. 

So he is not surprised when a line of fire stripes horizontal across the dirt yard just as he’s getting close to Keith. Keith’s still looking at him, eyes bleary, face growing whiter. 

Allura once asked him what the fire feels like for him, if it doesn’t hurt. All Lance could say was that it’s like stepping into a body you’d nearly forgotten about. Awkward at first but familiar already.

It is like that now. 

As he steps into the flame he is full of nothing but pure vitality, life force. Ether. He senses his tattoos whipping around him, as the excess energy they absorb from him pushes them to ferocious movement. He hardly feels it when his clothes burn away from his body, bits so scorched they’re black as kicked-up dirt right before they crumble into something imperceptibly smaller. There is something else too, a tremendous, sublime presence at his back. 

He has only felt it once before.

Lance was held captive in a cabin for several hours by a group of high-ranking human and Belitian soldiers once. They were eminent enough to be considered aristocrats. He was fifteen. In those days he used to escape from his security detail to practice his sword-fighting alone in empty meadows, with nothing but the trees as witness. Sword-fighting has never been something that comes as easily to him as archery or mathematics do, and the thought of having other people watch his fumbling attempts to learn made him terribly self-conscious. So after watching royal knights spar with their apprentices from his bedchamber window, he would run away from his guards to the forest, find a clearing, and practice what he’d seen. 

The soldiers were arguing over the color of Belitian blood. The human soldiers insisted that it was purple if you cut deep enough, but the Belí claimed that it ran blue as a berry. The humans asked to slice open their compatriots to check, but the Belí told them to fuck right off. Lance still remembers that one of the human soldiers had a laugh like a steel wool pad scraping the bottom of a metal pot. 

Lance did his best to tune them out as he ran through the latest maneuver he’d seen: a pivot into a downswing of his blade. He thinks he could’ve gotten away, if not for his focus. He ignored them, and before he knew it, he was overwhelmed. Lance has always hated the royals, but that day he pulled rank, authoritatively, then desperately. They did not believe him.

In all of his wild flailing, before they disarmed him with ease, he managed to slice open the chin of one of the humans, a man with a rounded face and watery red eyes. He smacked Lance so hard it knocked him unconscious.

At the cabin, a long-abandoned outpost, all of the soldiers agreed that his face should be left as pretty as they’d found it, but they never touched him… like that. They didn’t have the chance to. A solace. Lance has worked hard to entomb the memories of the cutting knife, the blades buried deep into the underside of his biceps, then dragged to his elbows like a till pulled through soil. 

There was one soldier who never took off their visored helmet, who stood as a lookout as his brothers in arms sated their curiosity. Some days, Lance thinks he hates that soldier the most of the group. The silent enabler, Lance’s single hope for freedom entirely unmoved.

That’s when he found his fire. It was the first particularity of his ancestry that he discovered, the first indication that he is truly unlike any other living Belí. 

His fire started out as nothing but an aggressive, nipping warmth in his stomach. He’d mistaken it for simple fear. It burned hotter, then hotter, until the next time the round-faced man bent down to cut him Lance shot flame from his lips and charred the skin of his face down to the skull. 

He set the cabin on fire. Every soldier died. Most days Lance thinks he did them a favor; they would have been carrying their own intestines for days if their punishment had been left to the Ekrimian crown.

As Lance stood there in that blaze, clothes flaking off of him like dry skin, he felt it. That heavy, sublime presence. He’d turned around to look to see what it might be, and saw a faint shadow, dissipating already, of a huge dragon head. It reminded him of his mother in her untransformed state. 

Two forest spirits, Oriel and Khamael, found him curled up naked in the burnt wreckage of the cabin, surrounded by blackened bones. They led him back to the palace. He collapsed outside the gates. He slept for days after that. Days after he woke he would not eat. That’s when the king and queen, operating entirely out of character, did an extremely sensible thing (though Lance suspects that Councillor Nadia had something to do with it): they sent him to his cousin Allura’s hollow at the heart of the Ekrimian forest for a deeper recovery. Aside from the brief time that he spent with his parents when he was very young, hidden away in the lush winter caves of Mt. Balmera, those were his happiest years.

In the burning Feyivi base, when Lance turns back to look for that presence again, it is already fading. He only catches the briefest glimpses of a spiked, white mane and huge almond-shaped eyes.

Lance’s life-force magic allows him to pick up on every living thing’s heartbeat within a ten mile radius, from the hummingbirds to the robins to the squirrels to the quickly accelerating pulses in several different Feyivi locales (the brothels, if he had to guess). He can feel the strange sluggish beat of the trees and foliage around them, something as deep and resonant as a slackened earthquake—the life-sound of the vegetation. From what Lance can sense every room of the base is empty. His range is improving, but the noise is almost too much. 

As he kneels down before Keith, Lance hones in on his vital signs through sheer force of will. Every other infernal thing is so damned loud. He beats back his dread as he takes Keith’s face (Keith’s too-warm, sweaty face) into his hands. 

Lance does not know if this will work.

He listens to how Keith’s heartbeat slows down like it’s surrendering to a chase. There is a nasty burn on his right calf. Lance’s dread is rearing up again. Keith’s left lung has been pierced, and it’s rapidly filling with blood. It is in imminent danger of collapse. Lance closes a hand around the dagger Keith still has in his side, over Keith’s own clenched fist. Every single breath that Keith takes is an agonizing one, and Lance feels samples of the pain in acute, random snatches. Somewhere in the wood behind them a bird screams. 

Keith is saying something as Lance begins to pull the dagger free.

“‘S not safe,” it sounds like, “‘s not safe… h… here…”

“Keith,” Lance says, and his voice is smaller than it’s ever been.

Then the blade is loose and Lance can actually  _ see  _ the wound. He swallows as he covers it with his palm, and enters into a frantic mental review of every single deer leg he’s ever healed, every broken squirrel arm, every cough he’s gotten rid of for Allura. Then the bigger ones—the boar he’d saved who’d taken a javelin to the stomach, the village dogs with broken ribs from royal carriages. They are meager references in comparison to what he is about to attempt, but they are all he has.

He closes his eyes tight as he works. If Keith is truly to pass away in his arms he will not watch it. 

He channels as much energy as he can into the wounds he feels. And it’s…

It’s almost impossible to describe, the sensation of a body stitching itself back together because you will it too. Lance feels it when the puncture wound in Keith’s lung closes, and when the perforation in his side follows suit. When the skin on his calf, blistering already, returns to an even, painless state. If Keith was not of such light coloring, Lance wouldn’t even be able to make out the slight pink flush where the burn used to be. Keith hisses from the ache of recovery, and Lance strokes the bone of his cheek in sympathy. They’re completely surrounded by flame, but now that Lance is touching him Keith is completely unaffected. The same cannot be said for his clothes, completely consumed as Lance’s had been. Keith’s breathing has stabilized, his heart is still slow, but steady. 

Lance has been focusing so much of his attention on Keith that he nearly misses it. Multiple pulsebeats coming from the southwest direction, heavy breathing. Over the sound of the fire he can hear the faint sounds of clanking armour.

Lance knows that there is not much time. In a few moments, they will be overrun. In a few moments, the Order’s soldiers will march into this base, bring the multiple attempts on Keith’s life to a terrible completion, and drag Lance back to the Arusian capital where he will be used as the very thing his parents feared he would be used as, should the truth of his ancestry come to the attention of Ekrim’s enemies: a weapon.

Thousands of years ago, before humans were even a consideration on this land, there were plenty of Belí like Lance. Belí with one faery parent and one dragon parent, each of full-blood, who were born with the ability to breathe fire, to practice ether magic. Some were even able to resurrect the dead by draining the life energy of other things. There is a reason those unions were forbidden so soon after they’d only begun, Lance supposes. 

It is a history that is heavy on his mind as he hears the armored guards closing in. As he holds Keith against his chest, so close that he can see the rapid movement of his eyes beneath the thin, pale lids. Lance expects to feel drained once he has used his magic—he always does—but he feels like he’s just ridden forty leagues without a saddle on the back of a horse who has been tasked with bucking him into the dust underfoot. Their only chance is to cross the border into Ekrim, just five miles away. Lance knows that the forest spirits could help them to Allura’s meadow, if he could just get into the country. But there is no way that Lance will make it with Keith with his energy so low, with the Marmoran guards so close. Even if Lance’s tattoos  _ are _ strong and sentient enough to pull along whole bulls without any effort on his part.

So Lance kneels there with Keith against him, with the fire around them, with shouting behind him, and recalls the little earth elemental trick Allura taught him soon after the party of soldiers held him captive. He didn’t know how to fight with a sword well enough to protect himself then, and he didn’t know how to fight with his magic either. One of the first things he’d asked Allura to teach him, when he went to her hollow, was how to evade. And she, an earth elemental, had taught him this trick before they both learned that Lance is a life-force user. Earth and life-force magic share many of the same beats, after all.

Lance keeps his gaze steady on Keith’s slack face, his lips inexplicably red even as his cheeks remain colorless, and sets a hand down into the dirt beneath them. He feels an aggressive gloved hand at his back just as the ground opens up and gulps him and Keith down like they’re water for a dry throat.


	2. Chapter 2

In the brief moments that Keith is actually conscious, after he watches Lance walk through the wall of flame for him, Lance’s face is a too-bright blur. Keith thinks he says something to Lance. He thinks he eases it through pain-roughened breaths. Then Lance touches him and pulls the dagger free, and for a moment Keith fears that he will do nothing but spill. But Lance puts a hand on the wound, the pain ceases, and Keith drifts. 

In the brief flashes that follow, Keith is surprised that death is so… dark. The god of death is Aktia, the ruler of the morning. Keith had always been taught that death would be the fracturing of life’s pain, the breaking of a new dawn, that sort of thing. So he’d expected light, maybe a clean-shaven man spitting a fully-grown sun from his mouth, like in the temple renderings Keith has seen back in Arus.

He feels a bare heat against the skin of his arm, something that might be a chest. Lance. They’re huddled in close. There is muffled yelling somewhere above them. Soft curls swipe his cheek. A quiet voice says, 

“Rest,”

So he does.

↡

He has a good dream.

He is on the sawdust back at the palace in the Capital, sparring with Romelle. Shiro is leaning against the wall, watching with bright, avid eyes. Keith can’t be more than twelve, Romelle and Shiro eight and fourteen.

“Aw, at least spare his confidence before you take him down, Romi!” Shiro taunts. 

“No quarter!” Romelle shouts, using her wooden practice sword to jab Keith right in the opening Keith has left for her. 

“Oof!” Keith grabs his arm and goes down, as dramatic as he can be.

They’re all laughing.

↡

Keith has moments of twilight sleep, where he’s just conscious enough to swallow down water, and something else that tastes like briny broth. 

“This one is so active, even in his sleep! I wonder what he will be like once he awakens!”

“Please Oriel, he is not a puppy.” Lance’s voice.

Keith fades. 

↡

Keith catches snippets of conversation. They are thin moments of dialogue that slip through his mental sieve at random. Whenever he hears Lance’s voice, his body tilts towards it.

“You are not dead.”

“No, I am not. Ever the sharp one, eh Oriel? Tell me, do I have three arms and is my nose a single giant ruby?”

“You deflect like a thief on trial.”

“I think I would be on trial for something much more extravagant than thievery. Striking a noble in the face with a horseshoe, maybe?”

“Estilucero.”

A pause. Then,

“I have failed, but it does not feel like a failure. I… do not like that.”

“Has saving the pet princeling muted your sense of defeat?”

Lance says nothing. Oriel speaks again.

“You do not give your favor lightly—”

“It is not favor,” Lance says, too quick to be anything but defensive.

Oriel hums, and Keith loses track of the moment as a heavier sleep takes him.

↡

Keith now understands how jarring it must have been for Lance when he’d woken up on the river boat. There are very few things more startling than being wrenched free of a scene, only to be launched into surroundings that are completely unfamiliar. Keith knows that he has lost time, and it makes him feel vulnerable in a way that he has never experienced, a compounded nakedness. 

If Lance had cut him with the tattoo blades when he awoke on the boat, Keith would not have blamed him.

Keith opens his eyes to find a low, curved ceiling above him. There is something flickering in his periphery, and when he turns to inspect it he frowns, not entirely sure of what he sees. A couple of glass orbs are floating mid-air, filled with balls of deep orange light. Keith pats the bed beneath him, under the single blanket draped over his stomach. He’s never felt a mattress like this one, plush in sum total but when he pinches a bit of it between his fingers he feels long, narrow shoots below the material. He’s reminded of grass tufts.

There’s a door right across from the bed, small enough that Keith is sure he will have to bend at the knees to pass through.

Against the wall to his right there is a figure asleep on a chair. Lance has his knees pulled to his chest with his arms wrapped around them, a cheek pressed against his kneecap. His face is towards Keith, curls falling across his cheekbone and nose. He looks so tranquil like this, sole bearer of a serene beauty too exquisite to exist outside of a painter’s dream. And yet.

Keith swallows as he catches himself staring. This is him. This is the man who had tried to kill Keith’s parents, who has saved Keith (twice). A patchwork of contradiction with the mouth of a godless sailor, the mind of an abacus, and the face of a treasure. Keith does not understand it.

Lance blinks awake, and Keith does not look away in time.

Lance carefully unfolds himself. He runs his hand through his hair in a gesture that Keith has never seen from him before, but instantly registers as a personal quirk. It leaves Lance’s curls ruffled, the most disarrayed Keith has ever seen them.

A moment of complete silence passes between them. Lance’s face is as unreadable as Keith’s ever seen it, but even that, in and of itself, is telling. Prince Estilucero, who seems to have a verbal or material response for every occasion, hasn’t the faintest clue how this is going to go. The realization hits Keith in a burst of gratifying surprise. He’s almost giddy with it. 

Keith holds that blue gaze and knows that they are both passing over, in their minds, their confrontation outside of the Dawn Goddess temple. Keith is the first to speak.

“How long was I indisposed?”

“Two days.”

A sudden wave of cold fear hits him. “Shiro...”

“I have reason to believe he and his men are still alive.”

Keith’s had enough of hope. He’s exhausted by it, the tense of expectation in his muscles that leaves him sore and aching with nothing to show for it. But even so, he finds himself sitting up against the pillows, perked by the news. 

“Really?”

Lance is at his side immediately, pressing a firm hand to his chest to still him.

“Careful,” Lance says, and Keith feels a few heavy, unignorable pangs in his side, like his wound is seconding Lance’s admonishment.

Keith follows Lance’s direction to lay back down. Keith frowns, more cautious with his hope now. 

“How do you know?”

“The base was entirely empty when I arrived.”

“You… sensed that?”

“Yes.” Lance says the word slowly, like that single admission reveals all.

Keith tilts his head in curiosity.

“That is an… interesting feature of earth magic,” Keith says.

Lance says nothing. Keith continues.

“Almost as interesting as the rapid healing of mortal wounds.” He watches Lance’s face carefully as he says, “I don’t think there is any reason I should have survived that blow, yet here I am.”

“Have you been stabbed with enough daggers to know that?” 

Keith looks at him and Lance’s impassive expression falters for a moment.

“I am… sorry,” he says. 

Keith will mark this moment down as the first time he has ever heard Lance apologize for his tongue. 

“Lance,” Keith says, and the room falls quiet again.

“You were not healed by earth magic,” Lance says.

This is as Keith suspected, but the implication has him near trembling with an emotion that is half exhilaration and half disbelief. Earth magic is the only modern form of magic that can repair a human body. If Lance did not use earth magic on his stab wound, then… 

“Life-force,” Keith breathes, searching Lance’s face for confirmation. Lance seems to be doing his best impersonation of a marble statue, arms stiff at his sides.

“Yes.”

Keith’s mind is bringing him back to that scene at the base in Feyiv, where Lance walked through flame and remained unburnt. With a start Keith remembers the burn he’d gotten on his calf when the flames chased him as he’d crawled towards the tunnel, and that was from a single strip of flame. Modern day Belí have a heightened resistance to fire, but they can only hold out against burns for slightly longer than humans can, even though their skin does not blister. It is possible that resistance would only increase with the presence of dragonblood. It makes sense.

Lance’s skin is as smooth and flawless as it has ever been, like the moment at the base had never happened. Of course. Of course.

“That means,” Keith says, “that you’re—”

“It needs no further exposition.”

Keith observes him. “Are you ashamed?”

Lance shoots him a look full of venom, but Keith does not flinch.

“No,” Lance says.

Keith knows to leave it alone for now. And he needs to hear the answer to one question so that he can determine if his waxing hope over Shiro’s fate is mistaken.

“You said that you could sense the base was empty. Would it not have felt just as empty if...” Keith swallows. 

“No. Deaths leave a mark. After a person passes, traces of their life-energy linger on this plane for at least two months. I would have felt that.” Lance holds Keith’s gaze, blue eyes earnest. “I believe that your brother lives.”

_ Your brother lives _ . Keith needs it to be true. He is not sure what he’ll do if it’s not.

His mind returns to the subject of Lance’s incredible ancestry, and he says,

“It is a tremendous advantage, with this war on.”

Lance’s eyes go cold as he catches on to the switch in topic.

“Should I be stored in a travel sack with the other battle munitions as well?”

Keith realizes his misstep instantly, but Lance is already walking towards the door.

“Lance—” 

“Rest,” Lance says tightly. The door slams shut behind him. 

↡

The next time Keith awakes, he acts like it is morning. There are no windows in this room, so he cannot know for sure. 

He is alone in the chamber this time. The floating lanterns throw round, shadowed patterns onto his blanket. The ache in his side is a constant presence, but it is not enervating. Keith feels strong enough to move, and so he does. He frees himself from the blanket with little effort and scoots to the edge of the bed. His feet meet with a floor of pressed dirt and he rises.

The bandages around his torso are harder to ignore now. They scratch at his skin under the unfamiliar sleeveless tunic he’s wearing. The pain is a bit sharper now that he’s walking and his legs are stiff from laying in bed for so long, but they don’t hinder his progress too much.

It is just as he thought. The ceiling is so low he could knock the top of his head against it if he stretched onto his toes. The walls are dark pressed dirt. The room is completely bare except for the bed and the chair Lance had slept in. 

He’s nearly at the door when it bangs open.

Keith does his best not to gawk at the creature that walks through. From the irked eye roll he gets, Keith can tell his best is shit.

Keith has never seen a forest spirit in physical form before. They rarely take tangible bodies, and they make it a point to never materialize in Arus. 

This spirit doesn’t quite meet Keith’s chest in height. Their skin is even fairer than Keith’s under their body markings. In the painting back at the palace, the spirit body patterns depicted were always a single color, but this spirit wears quiltwork indigo and sage-colored tattoos on their arms, chest, and neck. Keith is instantly reminded of wedges of multicolored stained glass. 

“Estilucero wants you in bed, pet princeling,” the spirit tells him. The voice is familiar. Keith has heard Lance respond to it with the name “Oriel.”

Keith means to protest with a snippy  _ I feel well enough.  _ What emerges instead is, 

“You’ve spoken with Lance?”

“Yes, I have,” the spirit says. They set a hand to Keith’s stomach and push him back towards the bed with an impressive amount of strength. With little chance to react, Keith finds himself sitting at the foot of the bed. 

“He wants you to rest for another day. He granted me permission to tie you to the bedposts, if need be.” There is a hint of amusement in the spirit’s wide dark eyes. “To be frank, I am sure that is something he could handle on his own.”

Keith’s ears burn only slightly, and he’s proud of that. He disregards the fact that he should not be the least bit flustered by this in the first place and changes the subject.

“What is this place?”

“This is Cybelia, the Forest Spirit caverns. We are under the Ekrimian forest.”

Keith had suspected they were no longer in Arus, but his eyes widen anyway. This is not the furthest he has ever been from the Capital, but the weight of the recent past, the knowledge that he is now in the very place his countrymen have marked for annihilation, denatures the distance into a yawning stretch. 

“And what of the fighting?” The scene at the outer village near Feyiv—the burnt houses and blackened bones, the Belitian man slumped dead over the chapel threshold—digs into his mind and stays.

“That is too dignified of a word for it, pet princeling.” Oriel looks like he ages five years in the span of his two second pause. “As you know, your extremist sect has taken over the Arusian Capital. The Marmora Order sends its soldiers into Ekrimian villages to destroy all Belí they find. The Crown sends forces to shore up the border, and the Belí have certainly benefited from the help of the faeries, but the Order’s luxite swords are… formidable. They are now using dragon-scale shields as well. They are not invulnerable to elemental magic, but they are highly resistant to it.” A chill scuttles down Keith’s spine at this. He recalls Lance’s words. _ Scales can be melted down to make nearly impenetrable armor and shields _ .

Oriel looks disturbed by something, but Keith senses it doesn’t have to do with the dragon scale shields. Their dark brows draw together in a tight furrow.

“There is something else,” Keith says. 

“Yes,” Oriel says, face still drawn. “Estilucero believes that the Ekrimian Crown is using your countrymen’s aggressive campaign to thin out the lower Ekrimian classes.”

Keith’s mouth fills with a sour rage. 

“What?”

Oriel nods. “It is a conjecture, but we have heard from my scouts that all full-grown, able-bodied Ekrimians are supplied with a bow and several arrows and sent off to destroy Arusian villages in retaliation.”

“No armor?”

“No. Once all able-bodied inhabitants are sent away, Arusian guards remove the elderly, the infirm, and the young. Entire townships stand empty.”

A thought occurs to Keith.

“Can a number of them not resist conscription with their own magic? Elemental magic is evenly distributed across all mystical creatures, yes?”

“Yes, it is. But it is quite difficult to weaponize elemental magic when you were never trained to. The refinement of raw elemental ability is a privilege reserved for those who can afford teachers, I am afraid.”

“So then who fights for them?”

Oriel’s brows raise in surprise. “They are more than capable of fighting for themselves, with enough assistance. Though you are certainly on the right track.” Oriel gives him a considering look.

“What?” Keith asks after an extended moment of silence.

“I have never heard any noble express concern for commonfolk so plainly, aside from Estilucero. It seems that he has had quite the radicalizing effect.”

Keith considers this. It is true that he’s crossed grades of braided, complicated emotion since he met Lance. Fascination tempered by fixed distrust, competitiveness that smashed to bits any indifference he tried to curate, anger and antagonism shoved over into gratitude each time Lance saved his life after Keith was so sure he was responsible for its devastation. And he feels all of these discrete things, as blood-related as fingers on a hand, at once. 

But Keith looks up at Oriel and says nothing at all.

↡

Oriel tells Keith that there is a true resistance out there, a coalition of Ekrimian survivors, sympathetic faeries, forest spirit scouts, and even human soldiers who are fighting to stall both Arus’s genocidal campaign and the Ekrimian crown’s class violence. The Ekrimian survivors, Oriel tells him, are even willing to save the aristocracy that despises them if it means that their impoverished countrymen will be spared from Arus’s massacre. This is not to say that they will keep them in power once Arus is dealt with though.

“They will de-fang the snake and gut it if it resists,” Oriel says, a ghost of a smile skimming his lips.

“Human soldiers?” Keith says, sitting up. “You said ‘human soldiers’?”

Oriel nods. “There are a number of forest spirits who’ve reported the presence of a human company at Allura’s hollow.”

Keith recognizes the name. Lance’s faery mage friend.

“Do you know the name of their commander?” Keith asks, hope cresting.

“I am afraid not.” Oriel pauses and tilts his head to the side, eyes trailing away from Keith’s like he’s listening to something.

“Your nurse returns, pet princeling,” Oriel says, just as Keith hears footsteps right outside the door. Something else occurs to him.

“May I ask why forest spirits do not ever materialize in Arus?”

“Humans are the only bipedal creatures who find it acceptable to urinate on trees.”

Keith’s brows raise. “...Oh.”

Oriel hums. “It is not the only reason though. We find you gruff and coarse. Lustful as faeries with none of the charm.”

Keith is spared from having to reply when the door opens and Lance walks in. Oriel looks up at Lance, that same faint, secretive smile on their face. They take their leave, and Lance rolls his eyes.

Lance turns his attention to Keith then, and Keith feels himself tripping across every sentiment Lance has piqued in him. He is a pebble tumbling down a ridged wash board. Lance says,

“Lay back.”

“Lance, really, I’m fine—”

The words are not quite out of his mouth before he feels Lance’s hand, firm and uncompromising, against his chest. Keith yields as Lance begins to push him back into the crumpled sheets. Lance’s curls are spilling past his dark well-formed eyebrows as he tilts his head forward, as he moves with Keith. His hair is noticeably longer, if only slightly. Has this much time really passed? 

Keith is still holding himself up a bit with his elbows, head tipped up. 

Lance’s eyelashes are so long that the floating lights coax them into spinning noticeable shadows onto his cheeks. He has a beauty mark near the bridge of his nose, dark as an apple seed on cherrywood, that Keith feels like he’s seeing for the first time.

Lance’s face is unreadable. His eyes are as frustrating as ever, alarming yet impenetrable.

“All the way,” Lance says, pressing against Keith’s chest harder with a gentle but authoritative drive of his palm.

Keith allows his elbows to fail him. He’s flat on his back with Lance above him. He feels the dip in the bed near his thigh where Lance has placed a knee to brace himself. 

Lance nods a bit, like he’s deciding something for himself. 

“See? This is why you need more rest. I should not be able to do that. You’re stronger than me.”

Keith does not say that Lance is entirely correct. Keith does not say that yes, even though he’d almost died a short while ago, he outmatches Lance in pure physical strength so significantly that the ache in his side would do little to impede him if he chose to shove Lance back. He does not say that Lance’s bottom lip is so red he can tell Lance has been chewing on it (another nervous tick?). He does not say that Lance missed a few eyelets in the short stretch of laces at the front of his sleeveless tunic, and that he can see the linear furrow that separates his chest into warm brown halves. He does not say that he’s only ever seen a Cupid’s Bow as pronounced as Lance’s on paintings of the ancient Arusian princess Romelia (Romelle’s namesake), fabled to be so stunning that she had enough suitors to stage a three-hundred-person battle royale in the mountains of Krell for her hand. He does not say that when he thinks of Lance there are scenes that crash into one another and hold still in the discordant ruin that they become, like badly formed planets.

He does not say that he thinks of Lance propping the little girl Cyna against his hip, tickling her, then handing her off to her mother so that he can launch himself over the side of the boat into river water, so that he can drop to the bottom and sink through a tender earth that leads him right back to Melenor’s Eden, one that coughs him up past garden dirt, that leads him back to the wall he’d been willing to scale, to the people he’d been willing to kill, for his war. Keith does not say that when he thinks of Lance he thinks of an arm across his chest and soft curls against his shoulder, of defense against a nighttime blitz. He does not say that when he thinks of Lance he thinks of those moments in the tavern and on the back of that stolen destrier, with Lance gummed so tightly to his terrible memories that in those desperate minutes Keith and the ones who hurt him shared a face and body. Keith does not say that he does not want to hurt Lance. Keith does not say that he has been hurt by Lance, or that he wishes he could set that damage down on the ground between his knees and leave it here like an empty bottle of ale. He does not say that he is confused. He does not say that Lance’s beauty has ceased to be an objective observation for him, that it is now a thing in set motion, active as a laugh flung up a throat.

Lance looks down at him with his hand still against Keith’s chest. His lips part like he means to say something. But he pulls away instead and stands up.

“Can you scoot back on your own or will you sleep with both your feet on the ground?”

“That is much more comfortable than sleeping in a chair for a whole night, I would imagine,” Keith says gently, stuck on Lance’s manifest care. He moves up the bed till his head is against the pillows once more.

“Two nights,” Lance says. 

He walks around the bed and sits at the edge, near Keith’s closed wound. Keith is surprised and his chest twinges with it.

“You were beside me both nights?”

“Yes,” Lance says. He pushes Keith’s tunic up his belly to see his wound, and Keith lets him. “I was not aware of any time restrictions,”

Lance places a careful palm over the bandaged wound site. Keith is feeling much better, but he tenses a bit at the expectation that Lance’s touch will bring at least a little pain. But all Keith feels is a stream of relief, like he’s being administered some sort of salve through the bandage. 

“How are you doing that?”

“Simple. I am prodding at your wound and since you have yet to kick me in the jaw like a spooked horse, I assume that you are doing better.”

Keith huffs a laugh, too amused at Lance’s prickliness to keep it in. Lance looks up at him, lips twitching in surprise. Keith clarifies.

“No, I mean how are you alleviating the pain right now?”

Lance’s brows furrow a bit in confusion. Keith doesn’t think he’s ever seen Lance look confused about anything. Lance looks back down at the wound, then back up at Keith.

“Your remaining pain is dissipating?” Lance asks.

Keith nods. “Yes. Is this another feature of your life-force magic?” 

“I… suppose so. Though I think it may be an extension, not a brand new quality.” Lance pulls his hand away. Keith’s pain maintains itself at a deadened, barely-there ache. “How about now? How is it now?”

“It is still greatly reduced.”

Lance looks down at his own hand, face completely still but eyebrows so expressive it’s endearing. Keith identifies it as a look of muted wonder. 

“You will never be just a weapon, Lance,” Keith tells him. 

Lance looks up, face wiped blank, shoulders tight. He goes to say something, absolutely scathing if the icy look in his eye is anything to go by. But Keith cuts him off.

“You could not be so easily defined if you tried.”

This is what startles his shoulders into loosening. This is what shakes him towards a near-smile.

↡

Keith and Lance cannot set out for the hollow for several more days. The main caverns remain the private domain of the forest spirits and those who they invite to enter. But the various tunnels that run under Ekrim, though also constructed by the forest spirits, have been subject to random raids by the Ekrimian Crown since the early stages of the conflict. They’re searching for hidden villagers, townspeople, military deserters (as if this were not the very least of their problems). Lance, Oriel, his partner Khamael, and their scouts must take some days to map out a safe, undetectable path to Allura’s hollow. Lance and Khamael would be able to move the thick underground rock to create an even more straightforward path, but no one wants to irreparably disturb the wildlife habitats right above them. A part of Keith admires this care, but another part of him thinks that such a push would be worth it. They’re in dire circumstances, after all. But Keith holds his tongue. 

Keith sits in on the meetings. He expects to feel useless, but it turns out that constructing this route map is not unlike a game of strategy where your mind must go in thirty different directions to anticipate with any sort of accuracy your opponent's course. They spend hours at it, drawing and discussing potential maps at the planning table they’ve set up in another guest chamber. On more than one occasion Oriel and Khamael have left the table to sleep, and Lance has remained, dogged in his determination to break further ground. In those moments he looks alert enough but Keith can tell he’s running on fumes. Keith urges him to go to bed, in the same military commander tone Lance uses with him, and (wonder of all wonders) it works. Sometimes, though, Keith will stay up with him. Sometimes they will work well into the late night, bouncing potential options for emergency routes and diversion tactics off of each other, and Keith will get to witness the flashes of childlike joy that pass over Lance’s face each time they figure out something useful.

Touch becomes easier too, simple brushes of their hands as they reach for the same spot on a map, the bumping of their fingers as Keith stretches an arm out for a cup of water just out of his range and Lance picks it up to hand it to him, not even looking up from his work. Keith has never quite understood Lance’s relationship to touch and physical exposure, but he thinks that he is beginning to. He’s beginning to think that Lance naturally tends to an inherent comfort with both, and that it is his past that has marred it. Because there is a night where they work even later than usual, and Keith encourages Lance to leave with him, to get some sleep. Lance is even more contrary to this suggestion than usual, though Keith has seen him cover his yawns with his hand several times. Keith stands, walks over to where Lance is still sitting, and asks again. He forgets himself and places a hand on his bare shoulder. He pulls away as soon as he realizes what he’s done, but the brief moment of contact is enough for him to feel it: Lance leans into the touch with a near-sigh before he tenses and moves away, sliding to the edge of his seat so he’s even closer to the table now. He says nothing, but when Keith asks again he gets up and goes to bed.

In those moments, he can pretend, just for a little while, that Lance did not intend to use his tattoo blades on Keith’s parents. Just for a little while.

There is another night, too.

Khamael and Oriel are gone, and there is a comfortable lull in their progress. They’re each sipping on just a little bit of mulled fruit wine, cups held carefully away from the map. 

“What will you do about your family, now that you’re back?” Keith asks.

Lance shoots him a hard look.

“I do not mean to pry,” Keith says.

Lance rolls his eyes. “Yes, you do.”

Lance considers him for a long moment, takes a sip of wine, and then responds.

“I do not wish to go back to them, and even if I did, they would not have me.” Another sip. He levels Keith with a steady look. 

“I was not the first choice for the exchange. Did you know that?”

Keith’s brows raise. He doesn’t recall his parents or anyone else at the palace making any mention of this. 

“No.”

“It would have been the king and queen’s third child, Marco. But a few months before the exchange, there was a dispute in one of the townships. I was learning basket-weaving from the barber’s daughter at the time. We were on the porch, so I saw when the Crown sentries came into the village—gods, they were such jackasses from the very start. There was this four-post wooden archway at the front of the town, and one of them tripped and smashed his head into it so hard, helmet and all, that they split one of the posts.

They were there for the shoemaker, who’d gone into some debt in order to add an additional chamber to his one-room hut. His wife had just given birth to twins, and they already had three children. They were in dire need of the extra space. But the sentries were not there for the debt itself. No, the shoemaker had already paid it off. They were there for the interest, and when the shoemaker couldn’t cover that they moved to take one of the children.”

Lance stops here, mouth open just slightly like whatever he was about to say had just been taken over by another thought.

“What happened next?” Keith asks.

“I intervened.”

Lance takes a few more sips. He drains his cup, so he grabs the bottle they’d been given. He turns the bottle over only to find it empty as well. He stares down into the decanter with a frown of intense concentration, like he’s trying to figure out where the wine went. It’s disarming in how plainly adorable it is. 

Lance sighs, sets the empty container aside.

“I attempted to speak with them with some decorum, but that did not go over very well. My identity could not be confirmed because I had broken away from my guard yet again, and I was not wearing any royal livery. One of them offered to teach me how to suck cock—quite thoughtful, really, the basket-weaving was becoming a bit too painless—and the other reached for her sword. So I reached for mine. I think I cut off, hm, seven fingers between the four of them? Maybe a hand as well. Their technique was strangely shoddy.”

Lance’s eyes shift to Keith’s. It’s terrible, but Keith feels a little like laughing. He blames the wine.

“I did not have much on me, but I was able to provide the shoemaker and his family some money to flee, and the following day I had some of Oriel’s scouts find them so that I could send them additional funds to settle wherever they wished. My family could have lived with a few low-rank soldiers losing their appendages, but this they could not abide. So they sent me to Arus instead of Marco. They...” Lance swallows. “Knew about my general aversion to human aristocrats, so they thought it would be a fitting punishment.”

Lance leans an elbow against the table and rests his chin in his palm. He blows some air out through his lips and his bangs lift with the small wind. The wine has made him looser, more blithe than Keith has ever seen him. 

↡

The forest spirit caverns are an architectural marvel.

The layout is simple. The passageways, which lead off to innumerable rooms, each branch off from a large circular center, like the many arms of a drawn sun. Keith had assumed that the hallways would be pressed dirt, like the room he was in, but the walls and floors of the hallways are made of white-gray rock. Much of the center’s surface area is taken up by a large underground lake, so blue it looks like a reservoir of spilled paint. Sharp, sparkling stalactites hang down from the ceiling like deconstructed chandeliers; some are so immense that they’re as thick as Keith’s chest at their widest point, and dip down into the lake like fingers testing the water’s temperature; some are as small as baby teeth; most are as long as longsword blades. The lake is ringed by an elevated space of white-gray rock populated with tables of marble and low couches of upholstered moss and grass. 

Keith thought that, since they meld with trees, spirits spend all of their time above ground, but this is not true. They spend much of their time down here for rest, for protection, for recreation. 

“The tree meld is more of a symbiotic energy-boost,” Oriel explains to him. 

There are far more spirits than Keith thought there would be. He hadn’t been able to hear much while he was recuperating in one of the guest rooms, but once he’s allowed (which is to say, Lance allows him) to walk the whole of the space, he finds that the caverns are lively and full of inhabitants. 

They are wary of him at first, and they whisper behind their cupped palms. After several instances of this open, low-volume gossiping, Lance is the one to say to Keith at dinner, in that completely unaffected tone of his,

“We will have to ask one of the garment workers to take your breeches in at the inseam, so that your admirers can put their speculations to rest.”

Keith chokes on the spoonful of cooked carrot he’d just swallowed, and the table of whispering spirits next to them falls completely silent. 

Lance observes him like one would a middling game of chess.

“Did you really not know?” 

“Limitations of human hearing, I’m afraid.”

“You are as oblivious as a duckling at the edge of a cliff.”

“You should respect me more.”

“You should earn my respect.”

“I’m two years older than you!”

“Hm, yes, which means you  _ are  _ aging quite rapidly. Better get to work, then.”

↡

They leave the following morning, cross-body bags filled with provisions supplied by the spirits. Keith takes the (now-clean) dagger, tucks it into his waistband before he can think about it too much. 

The walk to Allura’s hollow, if they were taking the most direct route, would be half a day. But their deviations will delay them an extra day. Khamael, with a cleft chin and dark blue constellation tattoos that give them the appearance of a starry sky, will be their guide. He can actually sense the tunnels in ways that Keith and Lance cannot. 

The walls of the travel tunnels are simple stretches of rougher rock. Unlike the cavern tunnels, they’re completely unlit. Their walls are simple stretches of rougher rock. Keith, Lance, and Khamael each carry one of those floating orbs of light. When Keith touches the glass it is as warm as flesh, and he nearly drops it.

“They’re fire bugs,” Khamael explains. “Think of them as distant dragon cousins. They’re social creatures, but quite incendiary. We tried to set them free but they refused to leave. This is the best solution we could come up with.”

Things go well for the first several hours. Keith must have smashed Shiro’s watch when he fell down at the military base, because when he takes a moment to look at it the face is cracked so badly he can barely make out the arms. Keith can’t believe it’s still working.

They’ve just re-commenced their walk after a periodic break (around seven hours in), when Lance signals for them to stop. It is completely silent for a moment. Then Keith hears it, the long-winded creak of something solid under tension, then a muted but unmistakable  _ crack _ . It kind of sounds like—

“Ice forming,” Khamael murmurs. “Water elementals—”

The cracks get so loud they eat up Khamael’s voice. Then the entire ceiling of rock directly ahead of them crumbles, a quake that makes Keith’s teeth clack, and morning light swarms in. Keith catchest the briefest glimpses of pointed ears and dark, phoenix-emblazoned robes before he’s running back the way they’d come, Khamael and Lance beside him. 

They turn several times, adopting one of the emergency routes he and Lance had devised on one of those late nights. Keith can hear their pursuers behind them, and he has such a vivid memory of running through the passageways below the palace with Lance that it’s like they’d never made it out of the tunnels. 

Keith isn’t sure how Lance manages it while they’re running, but in a few more moments Lance has taken all three fire-bug lanterns in hand.

“Scatter!” Lance tells them. “Come back when it is safe.”

They rush past Keith’s head, back towards their faery pursuers. The group is swallowed by the dark with their lanterns gone, but Khamael grabs Keith’s wrist before Keith’s pace has a chance to falter, and Keith can only assume he’s grabbed Lance too.

“Stay close,” he pants.

For a moment, the sounds of their pursuers behind them don’t diminish at all. For a moment Keith thinks that they might be overrun. But after a few beats, the sound of their own labored breathing becomes louder. 

They don’t stop running, but after a few beats, Keith’s panic leaves.

↡

They alternate lookouts.

The fire-bugs return, and Lance coaxes them in low, gentle tones to lessen their glow.

Two of them sleep with their backs against the rocky wall while the designated watch-person stays up. Khamael has his forest spirit spatial sense. Lance has his keen hearing. Every time it’s Keith’s turn, he holds his dagger tight and prays that he will not be the reason they’re taken unawares. One of the glass lanterns bumps into Keith’s thigh, almost like a kitten would. With its light low like this, Keith can make out the rounded, red-gold body of a beetle-like creature, about as large as his palm. It has pincers, but its wide eyes make it look a lot less alarming than it might otherwise. Keith places a tentative hand on the warm glass, surer when it tips against his thigh with more intention. Keith is grateful for the company.

After a few hours, when they’ve all gotten a little bit of rest, they continue.

Keith feels the strain in his legs, and his feet are sore, but he will not complain. Not when Shiro might be waiting for him on the other side of this. Not when these minute twinges of pain are the least of his worries.

Khamael stops them after they’ve walked for some time. He looks down at the map.

“All four of the tunnels we decided on are caved in.”

“And the other detectable ones?” Lance asks.

“None of them go directly to our destination. We would have to emerge about fifteen or twenty miles out from the hollow. We’d be delayed by an additional day and half.”

They all exchange glances, and understanding dawns. They go as far down one of the caved-in tunnels (their original choice, selected for how quick it would have been in comparison to the others) as they can, until they meet with a stoppage of huge rock chunks. 

The ceilings are not too high, maybe about four or five feet above Keith’s head. He sets Khamael on his shoulders to manipulate the rock and pretends not to notice it when the forest spirit, before climbing onto Keith, looks to Lance for something like… permission?

Several long moments later, Keith and Lance are climbing up the dry, skin-scraping root that Khamael drops down into the tunnel for them. The fire-bugs float up ahead of them. Keith shuts his eyes tight in anticipation of bright morning light, but the sun has long since set. 

Lance helps Khamael close up the hole they’d just climbed through, kneeling across from each other with their palms against the rock. Their motions are careful, and after a moment Keith understands why—the initial break was simple, with no greater aim than to create an escape hatch for them. But now they’re attempting to return the space to its former state with as much accuracy as possible. A careful, unhurried restoration.

It might just be a trick of the light. The fire-bug in one of the lanterns squirms after all, and its glow trembles for a moment. But for that moment Lance’s fingers look unsure, where his hands are pressed to bare rock near the ragged edge of the aperture. For a moment, gone is the rigid confidence. Keith wonders at the extent to which Lance can use the earth elemental magic he’s learned to mask his true magical bend. Khamael is stronger than him in this arena, plain and simple. And Keith does not think that Khamael, likely under the impression that Lance is an earth elemental with years of specific training in such skills, knows it. Khamael’s tunnel-sending ability is particular to him, it’s not suspicious that Lance couldn’t help much with that. But Keith wonders how much of Lance’s life has been just this—darting in and out of partial truths, feints to avoid detection. 

Once the passage is closed, they take a moment to get their bearings. They’re in the thick of the Ekrimian forest now, brief, oblong pieces of star-lit sky just barely visible past the canopy. Khamael tells them that they’re about four hours out from the hollow like this. Though dangerous, this is a faster pathway than any of them had dared hope for. Lance has the firebugs leave for real this time, and they all stay close as they progress through the dark wood.

Keith is unaccustomed to spending his days in silence (even when he’d retreat to his chambers for “peace” back at the palace, background noise was a constant). Quiet has been imperative to their travel from the caverns, but Keith does not enjoy it. Especially when so much of his time recently has been spent with the bracing life-noise of Lance.

They have been walking for some time, and Keith has narrowly avoided tripping over about nine overgrown tree roots, when they notice the faint lights in the distance, the measured flicker of several oil lamps if Keith had to guess.

He moves in closer to Lance, who moves in closer to Khamael. He tries to ignore the fact of Lance’s smooth, warm arm against him. How does his mind even have the space to fixate on this anyway?

This is why, as they carefully approach the oil lamps, Keith feels it as the muscles in Lance’s tense. This is why he hears it when Lance whispers in disbelief,

“No.”

“Estilucero, wait—!” Khamael is whispering, but Lance is already rushing forward.

Keith bounds after him, and he hears Khamael running behind them both. Keith’s foot actually catches on a root this time, and though he falls he only touches the ground for a single breath before he’s up again, trailing the curly-haired shadow.

Lance hits the break in the trees first, and once Keith leaves the treeline too he stops for a moment. There is a town in front of him, squat houses with lit windows. A quick look at his watch tells Keith that it’s nearly four in the morning. There is a four-post wooden entryway at the front of the town. One of them is so damaged that the entire structure is leaning heavily to one side. Lance runs through it without stopping, as if he’s familiar with the area.

As if he’s familiar with the area.

_ There was this four-post wooden archway at the front of the town, and one of the sentries tripped and smashed his head into it so hard, helmet and all, that they split one of the posts. _

Keith chases after Lance down the unpaved pathway. Lance stops abruptly in front of an old brown house, several yards inside the town. It appears to have a single window, right next to the door. Lance goes to knock, but he catches a glimpse of something through that lit window. His face goes gray. The veins in his hand and forearm work wildly under his tattoos as his fist clenches. He looks unsteady on his feet, and Keith recalls that moment at the chapel. Keith rushes forward just as Lance collapses, wraps his arms around his waist as Lance falls back against his chest.

“ _ No, _ ” he says again, and the word cracks.

Keith’s standing in front of the window with Lance now. He can see into the house.

There is a brown clay bowl full of oranges on the table, so fresh they’d likely been picked today. A man is slumped forward, dark-haired head set in a warped island of his own dried blood. His mouth hangs open and his eyes are unseeing. The daughter and two sons are in a heap in the corner with their clothes stained red. Keith can only see the daughter’s face, a deep brown oval. She could be Romelle’s age. The mother lays face down near the door, and Keith cannot tell what brought her end. Keith’s eyes fill up with hot tears as he looks away. As he looks down to Lance in his arms.

They’re so deep in the Ekrimian forest, only a couple of hours out from the hollow. Keith finds it hard to believe Arusian forces have gotten this far in such a short period of time. Keith’s blood runs cold with what this means. 

Lance was right.

“Fuck,” Lance is muttering, and the word is thick and wet. “ _ Fuck. No— _ ”

He scrabbles at Keith’s chest, and his frantic motions bring them both to the ground. For a moment, Keith thinks that Lance is trying to break free so he loosens his grip. But Lance only turns to grasp two handfuls of Keith’s tunic. He goes completely quiet, completely still.

Then he shakes, and Keith feels the skin of his chest growing slick with the tears that soak through the fabric.

Keith holds Lance tight, and turns his head to watch Khamael as he checks, one by one, the rest of the houses. His heart-shaped face grows more and more drawn with every single one, and Keith knows.

_ I wanted one more war so badly that I was even willing to start one myself. So they could carve out a country for themselves _ .

Keith remembers. And Keith understands. 

↡

“Here.”

Lance stops ahead of them as he utters the command. He has sucked in all of the knee-buckling emotion let loose some miles ago. For Keith, it is like watching someone swallow back the blood that fills their mouth. 

Keith watches as Lance takes a couple more steps forward, towards two trees so close together it’s difficult to tell which branches belong where. One of Lance’s arms is wrapped shoulder to bicep in a short sleeve of moonlight. 

Keith has lost his dagger, likely dropped it back at the village. He cannot say he regrets it.

He brings his hands to the tree trunks, one palm to each. He begins to say something out loud, in the round, clipped phrases of a chant. It takes Keith a moment to realize that he doesn’t recognize this language at all. It is consonant-filled, but Lance’s tongue rolls the lines with ease. Keith picks out a single familiar term from a one-off section he’d read in  _ Baku’s History _ , the ancient faery word  _ tandú _ . The word for a love beyond filial, a love that crushes death.

The forest stills around them. Then Lance says,

“Turn around.”

In place of the unvarying patch of wood they’d just walked through, there is a gorgeous sprawling compound of glass and bamboo. Some parts of the structure curl about thick tree trunks like cat tails winding round legs. Keith can see some tattooed Belí through the glass, passing through hallways, stopping for conversation. There are faeries too, more than Keith has ever seen at a single time. And other figures with no tattoos or pointed ears, figures that might be… human. 

Lance leads them to the compound, and the suspense is so unbearable that Keith has half a mind to overtake them, to bound ahead of Lance and Khamael so he can see the faces more clearly. But this is not his space, and he does not wish to overstep.

They are nearly at the entrance, two double doors of woven bamboo, when a deep voice intones from somewhere above them, 

“State your purpose.”

Keith’s shoulders tense as he prepares for confrontation, but Khamael laughs, and Lance sighs like he usually does when he’s rolling his eyes.

“I am standing at the front door, Ryan. One might suppose that I’d like to be let in.”

There’s a delighted laugh from the spot above them, then some rustling. Keith turns back in time to watch a handsome man with skin like darkened brass drift down from the canopy. He is clearly Belitian, an air elemental. He wears the broad, patently charming smile of a well-loved king, and Keith thinks, in a single agonizing sweep of memory, of his father. 

“Sureshot!” Ryan says as he pulls Lance into a hug. 

He pulls Lance into a  _ hug _ .

It might just be the most incredible feat of carelessness Keith has ever seen, like gripping hot iron with your bare hands to keep warm. And what’s more is that Lance returns the embrace, face softening.

Ryan turns to Khamael with that same smile, and Khamael backs away with a warning look in his eyes. The spirit says,

“Lift me again and you’ll be apologizing for it from an infirmary bed!”

“Oh come on! If you remain on the ground then you’ll have to tuck your face into my stomach as we hug. Isn’t that a bit demeaning?”

“Or we could forego the hug!”

Watching the exchange fills Keith with a weightlessness he didn’t think he could feel again. And in what little light there is, Keith notices that Lance is almost smiling. 

Lance catches Keith’s gaze. His eyes are still rimmed red from his crying, and there’s a tear in the side of his shirt. His face is still soft and hurt and relieved and troubled and Keith doesn’t think he could look away even if he wanted to. 

He doesn’t want to. 

Then Ryan turns to him. Ryan’s eyebrows raise, and Keith is bitten up by his strange, improbable, but nevertheless-present look of recognition. Then Ryan says,

“You look just like him,”

And Keith’s chest, cinched tight for so long, sighs open like its drawstring has slackened. He asks,

“Shiro?”

Ryan’s eyes brighten. And in the horned tip of his periphery Lance smiles gently.

↡

When they get inside the compound, Keith has but a shred of his attention to devote to the sleek maple wood walls inside, the alternating panels of perfect crystal glass. He doesn’t notice much else other than Lance’s departure from their group, because Keith’s life as of late, molten with calamity, has somehow cast parts of its unsteadiness around Lance and come away with a mold of him, so that Keith cannot live through even his short minutes without the keenest awareness of Lance. Keith doesn’t think he’s ever known someone in this way, against the vulnerable yield of the softer parts of himself, the ones that have been scraped tender by tragedy. Keith has never had this sort of helpless honesty be the basis of any of his relationships, and he can tell, from the way Lance tenses and falters and acts, that he hasn’t either. 

As Keith walks with Ryan down the hallway towards… towards Shiro, he can barely breathe. He barely registers the things that Ryan says.

Then they’re stopping in front of a large oak door, and Ryan is pushing it open. The first thing Keith sees is a young Belitian woman with glasses, bent over some map. The second is a man with a lightly-bearded profile, sitting across from her. There is a tuft of shocking white hair hanging over their forehead. The man turns his head, his eyes big and gray and kind. And familiar.

Keith feels himself choking. Shiro’s eyes widen, then his face fills with an incandescent relief and he’s rising from his seat. Keith is frozen still by the improbability that the truth could be better than he’d expected (so much better), when he’d spent so many of his recent nights training himself to accept the too-familiar alternative.

Shiro throws his arms around him and clutches him so tight that it hurts, and Keith wouldn’t change it for the universe. He thinks of Romelle, and joy and panic course through him.

↡

“You look more like me than I do now,” Shiro tells him when they have a moment alone. Ryan and the young Belitian woman, Nadia, give them the room for a bit.

Shiro manages the impossible and tightens the hug. Keith understands a bit more why Lance tends towards touch, what the appeal might be. Touch is proof. After weeks with nothing but speculation about his siblings, hours-long loops where the only mental images he had were of Romelle captured, dress bloody, and Shiro’s body bruised and streaked red, he still can’t quite believe that Shiro is here with him. That he’s okay. But he welcomes the disbelief. 

“Great,” Keith replies, “all I need now is the optimism.” 

“Please Keith, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Keith and Shiro look at each other, and they laugh. Gods, that feels good. But Keith has to know, 

“What happened back at the base?”

Shiro’s expression goes loose with sadness, and Keith ignores the taste like burnt rubber at the back of his throat.

“I heard about… them. At the day market in Feyiv. It was impossible to believe. But then word came that the Order had taken over the palace and I thought that you were… too.” Shiro looks up at him, and Keith feels the grief they’re sitting up to their elbows in. Shiro continues.

“I had to… hope that you and Romelle were okay, but operate like you were not. I knew that it was a matter of time before the Order came for my men and me. We were preparing for a fight. Men who’d gone the course of entire battles with gashes in their sides the length of a child’s forearm, retching at the thought of having to fight their own brethren, on their own territory.”

The Belí had to fight on their own territory during the Long War. Keith doesn’t say it, but Shiro sees the thought in the twitch of his brow. Shiro has always been the best at reading him. Shiro gives a small, bitter smile. 

“Yes. We are hypocrites, I know. But my men are my men. If I do not understand them I cannot lead them. This does not mean I agree with them.”

“We were preparing for a fight. Stationed behind the portcullises, along the watchtowers, along the balconies in the courtyard. But when an opposing company came it wasn’t from the south, from the capital. It was from the north, over the border.”

Keith’s eyes widen. Shiro’s smile loses its bitterness and grows.

“Ryan brought a group of about thirty Belí to pull us out. Gods, Keith, you should have seen them. Most of them looked like Ryan had just asked them to wash our undergarments by hand, but they followed his orders anyway. And they saved us.” Shiro’s brow furrows a bit, troubled at the weight of the situation. 

Keith is loath to make it any heavier, but he needs to know.

“Have you received any word from Romelle? Holt Stone?”

Something brighter passes over Shiro’s face, and Keith sits up straighter with his relief, with this anticipation of better news. 

“Romelle made it to Krell with our aunt and uncle’s household. She wrote me. She’s well, just worried sick about you. She’ll be so relieved to know that you’re safe.” Shiro smiles a bit. “And amused to hear about your travel companion.”

Keith scoffs. “Yes, well, there was a bit of a shortage in traveling companions. I would have traded him in if possible. I could’ve done with someone milder-mannered.”

“Really?” Shiro sounds unconvinced, and he’s still smiling. Keith doesn’t like how amused he looks.

“Yes, really. His speech would send a monk into a coma.” 

“And you don’t find it the least bit entertaining.”

“Not at all.”

“Hm. Any other quirks you feel the need to passionately describe to me?”

Keith does not look up at Shiro. He’s a bit afraid that his brother’s expression (shining and hopeful, he has no doubt) will make him lose his nerve.

“He is…” Keith pauses. “A presence.” 

↡

Keith would fall asleep in this bath if he could. Risk a little drowning for this bath, just a bit of incapacitation. He props his head against the lip of the tub, a white marble beauty scalloped and sunken into the ground, and the hot water relaxes his joints so well that Keith feels as though he will diffuse. That maybe he will open his eyes to find portions of himself filling up every corner of the bathroom. It has been a couple of hours since dinner, a lively affair that made his chest swell up with an emotion that did not hurt. He sat beside Oriel and Shiro and Ryan and watched his brother flirt (oh god of gods,  _ flirt _ ) with Ryan over plumfruit and mulled wine.

He met Allura, and about two minutes after their formal introductions, he watched her scoop a fallen dollop of custard from the chest of her velvet jacket with a piece of fried pastry dough. He was immediately a fan of her. Keith watched Lance make conversation with some red-headed faeries at the other end of the table, his smiles more rigid than Keith has ever seen them. When Lance excused himself to leave dinner early, Keith waited two minutes before he rose to seek him out. Keith found the corridor outside of the banquet hall nearly empty, save for a very drunk Belitian man who begged Keith for his shoes (not to wear on his feet, but on his hands as mittens). Keith wondered how inappropriate it would be for him to ask Allura for Lance’s room location. He settled on  _ too  _ with a mind that still itched to do it anyway.

Keith has just finished dressing for the evening when a knock sounds at his door. He has decided that he will attempt to find Lance (through Allura or Oriel, on his own if need be) to check up on him. Still, he is not looking forward to whatever knowing look/eyebrow insinuation/amused expression he will pull from Shiro once he opens this door and tells his brother where he’s going. But Shiro is not on the other side of the door when Keith opens it. 

It is Lance. He is wrapped up in a seafoam nightrobe. The color leaches into his light irises and greens them. His hair is damp, curls hanging low again. He smells of citrus soap and the scent darts into Keith’s mouth to sprawl across his tongue. They’re both quiet, and Keith mentally scolds himself. Lance has been through something absolutely harrowing. This is not the time for Keith to be considering the round of his bottom lip or the sheerness of his robe!

“I thought I’d intercept you before you attempted whatever cloying apology you’re turning over in your head.” 

Keith considers him for a moment. Lance’s shoulders are taut, and he’s barely resisting the urge to chew on his bottom lip. Keith spots the brief, straight flash of teeth. Keith wonders if Lance will be able to sleep tonight. 

“Come in,” Keith says.

Lance’s mouth clamps shut against whatever he was about to say. Keith could get used to surprising him quiet. When Lance doesn’t move to enter, Keith says,

“Oh come on, Lance. You hardly ever  _ seek me out _ for your bullying. And in your underclothes, no less.”

“I am more than capable of exasperating you in any state of dress.”

“Lance,” Keith says. “Come in.”

Lance doesn’t look at him as he brushes past Keith to enter the room. He spins a bit as he takes everything in, eyes caught somewhere above himself like a neurotic astrologer. 

“Hm. No exposed beams here, but my room looks like a bored toddler’s matchstick playhouse. I must be sure to ask Allura when, exactly, she stopped loving her cousin—”

Keith feels the realization mounting in him like passing time, like nervous seconds have mistaken his lungs for the minutes meant to house them. The realization that Lance is more distressed than Keith has ever seen him, but he still felt like he could come here. 

He walks up to Lance slow, telegraphs every single thing he is about to do. Lance stops his spinning, and his eyes widen a bit. But he doesn’t move away. The distance between them doubles over, then doubles over again, till Keith gets close enough to reach down for Lance’s hand. The fingers are long and slender, palm far less calloused than Keith had been expecting. He tells Lance so. Lance laughs, a small thing. With Keith’s heart beating as fast as it had when they’d run through the tunnels under the Arusian palace, he brings Lance’s fingers to his lips. Lance tenses, but he doesn’t pull his hand away. Keith makes his eyes, face, voice as sincere as he can when he says, lips brushing Lance’s skin, 

“Treat me as your confidant. Talk to me.” Lance takes a steadying breath, fingers curling reflexively.

Keith leads him to the bed. He lets go of Lance’s hand to settle down against the sheets, and pats the space beside him. Lance is still tense, pauses. Keith leaves the silence alone. He wants to give Lance all the time he needs. After several moments, Lance climbs onto the bed. Lance bunches up his robe so it doesn’t tangle in his legs as he moves (Keith is grateful that he’s wearing trousers, a loose-fit pair the same seafoam green as his robe; he doesn’t think his heart or head could take the alternative). They lay on their sides, heads pillowed on soft satin, facing each other. This close, Keith sees another beauty mark. Tiny and nearly imperceptible, right under the plump ledge of Lance’s bottom lip. Lance is beginning to relax. Keith moves his arm slowly as he drapes it across Lance’s waist. Keith hugs him closer, the material of his robe as delicate as candy floss under Keith’s fingers, then closer still. Till Lance’s head is tucked under his chin, perfect curls fluffed against the top half of his throat. When Lance speaks, Keith’s joints hold his voice. 

“I do not need their friendship.”

Keith remembers what he said to Lance outside of the Dawn Goddess temple.  _ Your identification with your commoners is a delusion. You could have them put to death at any moment, if you wished. That is no basis for friendship _ . Regret swamps him.

“Lance—”

“I need their safety. Anything else is secondary.”

“You can have more than one thing at a time.”

Lance makes an odd sound, something caught between a scoff and a laugh.

“Going back on your word? You sounded like you meant it outside the temple.”

Keith swallows, wonders if Lance feels it. He begins to stroke Lance’s back, and it’s almost involuntary. But the motion removes whatever remained of Lance’s tension. Keith’s mouth quirks into a brief smile at the instant change.

“I was angry, then—”

“I would not ask you to apologize for your anger—” Lance becomes agitated in his arms, and Keith switches to deeper, more circular motions. Loses himself a bit in the warmth between Lance’s shoulder blades, right over his spine. Lance settles. Keith says,

“But my view was, and is, ignorantly limited. Your kindness matters a great deal, Lance. To the people, and in general.” Keith thinks of the little girl Cyna again. He wonders where she and her mother are now. Keith continues.

“You deserve nothing but kindness in return.” Keith’s chest gets hot with that. It is the closest he can get to what he actually means to say.

Lance breathes deep, and Keith feels the exhale against his collarbone. Lance pulls back a bit, so he can look up at Keith. His pupils are dilated, and Keith tells himself that it’s because of the back massage.

“Not from you,” Lance says, voice unsure. “I don’t deserve it from you.” An apology.

“ _ Yes _ , from me,” Keith says. His heart beats harder as he kisses Lance’s forehead, right where his hair meets the skin. Lance lets out a small, sad sound, like he’s letting something go. Keith says it again, 

“ _ Yes _ , from me.”

↡

Keith wakes with Lance curved around him like the handle of a teapot. Outside their door, people are preparing for breakfast and training. Keith can’t believe how gently Lance comes to. It’s like watching a storm skid into its pauses. Gorgeous, rare. Lance takes a single long breath, and then he’s awake, alert against Keith’s chest. Gods, is this what Lance has done to him? Turned him into some repressed bard a single pair of tights away from caroling in a tavern somewhere? 

“You sleep like I am holding you hostage,” Lance says. His voice is deeper than usual, thick through with sleep. Keith wants to hoard the sound. 

“Was I lying too steadily for you? I will be sure to thrash around as much as possible next time.”

“Could you make sure I end up on the floor? So that I know that you put your all into it?”

“Naturally.”

Lance shifts so that his chin is tucked against Keith’s chest. He’s looking up at Keith now, eyes a clear, undeniable blue. His cheeks are flushed and he’s so pretty that Keith feels his stomach tightening with nerves and excitement. Like he’s a child once more, with his very first crush. 

“Next time?” Lance asks. The question is tentative, a little shy. Keith must do that thing again, where he unearths the rest of what Lance is saying. But he doesn’t mind, doesn’t think he will ever mind.

“Next time,” Keith agrees. 

Allura and Shiro go over the details of the retaliative campaign at breakfast. Keith is sure the other coalition members have heard all of this before, but their attention hardly wavers. Keith thinks he sees a Belí writing notes in between the tattoos on their forearm. Lance, beside him, sits so straight Keith thinks he hardly needs the supportive chair-back. To anyone else (save Allura, likely), the look on his face is impossible to parse. But Keith notices the slight purse of the full lips, the contemplative twitch of a brow. Their weeks and days measured by a coup, a boat trip, a detour through underground tunnels, and Keith has never seen Lance look quite so deep in thought.

The forest spirits have been running reconnaissance. A flat-out battle, coalition member to Arusian, is out of the question. The coalition is far too out-numbered for that. They plan on running something much more covert: half of the force will travel to the Arusian capital incognito, mix in with the displaced Arusian citizens fleeing from Feyiv from Ekrimian counterattacks. The other half will remain here to keep the base secure, of particular importance if the first contingent is made to retreat. A smaller subset of the Arusian force, the action unit, is tasked with slipping into the palace itself. They will be disguised as typical court petitioners, there to plead before their ruler. Their objective is to assassinate Haggar. This group currently stands at four: Nadia, Ryan, Oriel, and— Shiro.

Keith’s eyes go to Shiro across the table. Shiro, alive and intact and, apparently, more than willing to forfeit his own safety. Keith doesn’t know if he’s allowed anger, isn’t sure that it’s fair when all he should feel right now is relief that his brother is all right. There may be a note of selfishness in his rage, but he feels it all the same. 

Shiro looks back at him, face steady— _ kingly _ , so like their father—and his mouth opens a bit, as though they could possibly have this conversation right now. 

There is some movement in Keith’s periphery, then warm porridge is pouring onto the thigh of his trousers. He looks up, and his irritation rises when he sees Lance, still holding the bowl of porridge he’s emptying onto Keith’s pants. Keith is stunned wordless. When most of the bowl is empty, Lance says, tone completely unrepentant, 

“Oh gods, my apologies. Let us get this cleaned up.”

“You—!”

Lance pulls him from the table while he’s still a mess of feeling, tows him outside the banquet hall to the corridor beyond.

“This is none of your concern, Lance.”

“‘We are going to end this, Lance. Romelle, Shiro, and I.’” Lance offers up Keith’s words from the boat. “You are just like him. Noble. Do you really think that you could change his mind? Would he listen?”

And when Keith says nothing, Lance asks,

“Why don’t you want him to go?”

Keith rolls his eyes. “You are not dense, Lance.”

“Why don’t you want him to go?”

“He is the Crown Prince. He should be safe”

“Why don’t you want him to go?”

“Lance—”

“Why?”

“Because he was not there,” Keith blurts. Keith’s eyes widen, chest hot with  _ something _ . Lance comes closer to him, jaw set. Determined. 

“Keith.”

“He was not there for any of it. Not their deaths, not the coup, not the capture of the castle. He was not even there for the Melenor’s Eden affair.  _ I was _ , Lance.  _ Me _ . It all happened under me,  _ succeeded  _ under me. Why should Shiro wager his own life for my failures?”

Lance brings a hand to his cheek, palm warm and unmistakably there. What Lance’s touch does to him. It hands him back a body re-assessed, a mind gathered and still. Lance says,

“They are not your failures. They are your traumas. Your mind is unkind, and it will confuse them. But know this, Keith. Know the truth.”

Keith’s anger from before is cooling. He is able to notice that there is something subdued in Lance’s voice, something he is not saying. But Keith will not pry. He will let Lance come to him with it, in his own time or at all. 

Lance looks up at him with a small smile. His hand drops from Keith’s cheek, and Keith breathes sharply as Lance wraps his arms around his middle in a hug. Keith holds him tight, close, then closer. Till Lance is making a distinctly displeased sound, though he doesn’t move away.

“You are still drenched in porridge,” Lance says into his neck.

“You poured it on me!”

“So hung up on the details, aren’t you?”

↡

It is a training day. Most days at the compound are training days, it seems. Lance leaves him to practice his archery with Nadia. Lance’s face beams with excitement as he says this, at the prospect of holding a bow and arrow again, and the beautiful sight stirs something terribly greedy in Keith. A compulsion, sharp as whatever drives too-heavy things to collapse towards the world’s center, to stay beside Lance, always. To protect him, yes, but also to cake himself in those looks, that beauty, that rudeness. 

Keith goes back to his room to change his pants. He sits for an extra minute or two to make sure that his anger is truly gone before he speaks with Shiro.

He is leaving his room when Shiro catches him.

“I should have told you sooner,” Shiro says. “I’m sorry.”

Keith sees it then. Lance likely realized it too, but was too kind to bring it up in the moment: Keith is struggling under the fact that he was there, but Shiro is struggling under the fact that he wasn’t. Different corners of the same guilt. Keith means it fully when he says,

“It’s all right, Shiro. I was not being fair to you.”

This earns him a smile that smacks of home. Springs spent panting through foot-races against the children of nobles, Romelle’s fingers sticky with melted sugar from peach icies. Romelle. This afternoon, Keith decides, he will find paper and ink and write to her. 

Shiro and Keith look over as someone walks up to them. It’s Allura. Her big blue eyes twinkle when she sees them.

“Oh  _ there  _ you both are! I have something to show you. Come, come!”

Allura leads them to a drawing room at the very edge of the compound, then through a door at the back of the room. There is a flight of winding stairs there, so close to the door that Keith is a single misstep from taking the far quicker, far less dignified way down. The stairs churn them as they descend, heaves almost like a breathing lung, till Keith feels like they’re somehow walking away from the compound itself in a lateral movement instead of a vertical one. The stairs must be crooked, though it seems impossible. 

When they finally reach the bottom, they walk for only a few more seconds. Keith hears the concentrated metal pinging of hammers against steel. Allura leads them inside the forge. A Faerie man with his long hair pulled back from his face grins at both Allura and Shiro in greeting. He stares at Keith like he’s a novelty, small smile a bit amused.

The follow Allura towards the back of the forge and find Oriel there, attention fixed on something on top of the work table. He and the Belitian woman beside him, soot misted on her cheeks, look particularly satisfied with themselves. She says something, and they both laugh. 

Keith is now close enough to see what they’re observing. Two swords, one a sabre and the other a broadsword, unlike any Keith has ever seen before. Their blades are translucent as crystal, only visible against the deep almost-black of the work table. Their handles are not the usual wood that Keith has seen, a brown that seems to intensify and weaken at random, like coffee and cream in the midst of mixture. 

“Bamboo handles,” the Belitian woman explains.

“Ezor, you guys have actually done it?” Shiro murmurs, wonder evident.

“And the blades?” Keith asks. 

“Condensed ceiling crystals from Cybelia, the ones that hover above the pond,” Oriel says, “reinforced with earth magic. No easy feat. I was so exhausted after the infusion that I would’ve preferred to be kicked around like a pebble rather than walk.”

“Just you?” Keith asks. 

Oriel scoffs. “I’d turn a mountain into a school of fish if I had that level of power.”

“It was a collaborative infusion,” Allura says, “a team of twenty earth magic users.”

“And your love,” Oriel adds, eyes on Keith.

“Lance,” Keith says immediately. He only realizes what he’s said when four sets of eyes turn to him.

Shiro saves him, and Keith is so moved that he’s almost sorry for throwing Shiro’s favorite wooden toy horse against the cobblestones outside the castle when they were kids, just to see if it could bounce (only  _ almost  _ because Keith stands by the exploratory curiosity of his formative years). 

“When did Lance have the time? His party has only just arrived?”

“He came down to the forge right after he arrived yesterday,” Ezor says. “Looked like he was running on fumes but you wouldn’t have known it from the pulse we got from him. Pretty sure the kid tipped us over, made these beauties even stronger than they would have been otherwise.”

“Hey!” Oriel says, mock offense in his voice.

“Oh shut up, you felt it,” Ezor says. 

Allura stiffens just a bit beside Keith. If he hadn’t been standing so close to her, he wouldn’t even have noticed her tension. It doesn’t seem that Lance ran his contribution past his cousin. And Keith doesn’t think this would be her reaction if Lance had exclusively stuck to earth magic either. This, and Keith’s gut, tell him the likely truth: these blades are laced with ether magic. 

Allura relaxes beside him, and Keith sneaks a glance at her. There’s a fond smile on her lips.

“Little fool,” it sounds like she says. She turns to him and Shiro.

“I have brought you two down here because these are yours now.”

Keith’s eyes widen and Shiro’s face breaks out into an even broader wonder. 

Allura turns to Keith. “I do not mean to put you on the spot—well, I suppose that’s useless to say now since that’s exactly what I’ve done—but Prince Keith, would you join our action unit? We need someone else familiar with Arusian sword tactics, and—”

“Yes,” Keith says, the full brunt of his conversation with Lance knocking the response from between his teeth. He surprises himself with the eagerness of his response, but not with the fact of it. He needs to do this. 

Shiro, beside him, wears none of the tight-lipped reluctance Keith had been half-expecting. He looks supportive, encouraging.

“This is… unconventional,” Allura acknowledges, in a tone of voice that says  _ the more general society of my people would burn down this compound while we butter our bread if they knew _ . “Although both of your reputations as swordsmen are quite commendatory, we would like to minimize any chance of an unfavorable outcome.” Spoken like a diplomat, but Keith registers it just as clearly as he would have if she’d shouted it across a tavern in the coarsest speech imaginable: you  _ cannot  _ fail.

↡

Keith and Shiro pass the rest of the day training, first with regular swords against Shiro’s men (more for Keith’s benefit, since it’s been a while), then with their earth magic ones. 

The feel of Keith’s sword is unbelievable. Perfectly balanced, amenable to Keith’s every swing. And the harder he and Shiro fight, the more energized he feels. Shiro’s eyes widen a bit as their swords clank, as he realizes what Keith has realized. Keith knows that Shiro will chalk it up to the earth magic, but Keith knows that it’s Lance. At high noon, the sun vivid and live, their sword blades spectrum into mani-hued bands, red orange green and everything else, colors Keith is sure no one has thought up names for yet. 

Though Lance is not around (Keith knows this for sure because he’d checked the grounds… multiple times, ahem), it is like he’s  _ there _ . 

Somewhere beyond, either inside the deeper sweep of himself or over the line of trees, Keith thinks he hears a dragon.

↡

Keith sees Lance at dinner that night. Lance wears no vest, only a simple white tunic open at the throat, a smooth brown wedge of skin. Keith butters his fork for a solid twenty seconds before Ezor, rolling her eyes, hands him a roll.

Lance sees him off after the meal without mentioning anything about their sleeping arrangements tonight, so Keith partially suspects that he’s changed his mind.

Keith is pulling on his sleep shirt when there is a knock at his door. He opens the door, hope still measured, and finds Lance standing there. He wears a sheer peach robe this time (with trousers, thank gods) and his hair is damp again, black in this light. He looks so innocuous that Keith thinks, for the briefest of seconds, that he has hallucinated every wild word Lance has ever said.

“If you force me to sleep right outside your doorpost, you are leaving this hallway tomorrow morning with your shins thoroughly bruised, I can assure you.” 

Keith laughs. “Couldn’t I just step over you?”

Lance pouts, and it ignites a heat so sudden in Keith’s stomach that he’s reeling for a second. It’s patently _ cute _ , impossibly so. It should make him want to ruffle Lance’s hair (though he’s sure he’d lose all functionality in his hand for the trouble), not pull apart his robe.

“How disrespectful,” Lance says, and for a moment Keith thinks that Lance is on to him. Then he remembers the conversation they’re having.

“I’m the disrespectful one if I don’t allow you to trip me up like some yippy hound?”

“Exactly. First you deny me entry, then you deny me retribution. You are completely without honor.”

“Oh won’t you just come in, you intolerable brat?”

Lance pouts again, more exaggerated this time, and Keith must wrangle down the heat in his stomach like he’s grappling with some wrestling opponent on sawdust. 

Lance does come in though. Keith closes the door behind them. He watches as Lance climbs onto his bed like this is his room now.

“So rude to me,” Lance laments.

Keith scoffs as he walks over to the bed. He lifts the sheets to get in, the sheets on top of which Lance is very obstructively laying.

“Lance,” Keith says.

“Hm?”

“People sleep  _ under  _ the sheets.”

“You have made great intellectual strides in the time that I’ve known you.”

“Lance.”

“Yes?”

“Move.”

Lance raises up, but not to move off of the sheets. He raises up to his knees, legs folded under him so he sits back on his heels. All of the activity has caused his robe to fall down one lovely shoulder. The tattoo segment there reminds Keith of a compass, the way it cores and offshoots in four different directions. 

There is something mischievous in Lance’s eyes, terrible and mischievous. He searches Keith’s face, and Keith very  _ very  _ intentionally avoids glancing at the exposed shoulder. A beat of silence passes between them. Outside of the window behind Lance, the moon is a pupil-less eye. Then, the corner of Lance’s mouth quirks up into something cheeky. 

Lance shrugs his still-covered shoulder and the robe slips down that one too. The tattoo segment here is more abstract but no less beautiful, a gorgeous manifolded rupture (like a stemwork of veins) caught in black ink, brought to smooth brown skin. Keith grips the sheets tight as Lance’s robe slips down his upper arms. As thin peach material pares back to bare Lance’s collarbones in full, ridged and inviting as they are. Then Lance’s chest, brown nipples pebbling in the midst of the chase of goosebumps Keith notices on either side of Lance’s sternum. He can’t possibly be cold. Keith himself feels like he’s been trayed into a forging furnace. The robe falls further till it’s caught in the crook of Lance’s elbows, till Keith can see everything above his belly button—the form of his trim waist, the way it curves and crescents from the bottom of his ribs to his still-clothed hips. 

The light is nothing but a regular oil lamp, but Lance’s form, simply by being its object of illumination, turns it into a pressed, precious sun. Something hot and cosmic crushed between palms like dough, then brought here, for this.

Keith looks back up at Lance’s face. It might be a trick of the light, but Lance’s cheeks look almost… flushed? Is he blushing? 

“Ooh,” Lance says, something genuinely surprised in his voice. “You’ve never looked at me like  _ that  _ before.”

“Like what?” Keith asks. Keith’s knee sinks into the bed, like he means to climb on.

“Like I am on a platter fully garnished,” Lance says. He almost looks as though he’d like to look away, almost seems flustered. But he pushes through, gaze still locked on Keith,

“Like you want to eat me.”

“Is that how I look?” Keith asks, but he knows. Yes, that’s definitely how he looks. He drops his other knee onto the bed, sheet debacle completely forgotten. Lance nods, curls bouncing a bit. 

“How else have I looked at you?” Keith asks, crawling closer. His heart beats hard inside his chest as he waits to see what Lance will say, as he wonders if Lance  _ knows _ .

Lance’s eyes are the brightest blue Keith has seen them, soft and pretty.

“Like I am insane.”

“Mm,” Keith confirms, now close enough to see the beauty mark around one of Lance’s nipples.

“Like I am impossible”

“Mm.”

So much exposed skin in front of him,  _ so much _ , but Keith restrains himself. He waits for a cue.

“Like I am vexing you on purpose.”

Keith chuckles. “Mm.”

“Like I am funny and you did not expect it.”

“Mm.”

“Like I am smart and you did.”

“Mm.”

Keith’s zeroes in on Lance’s long lashes as Lance blinks slowly.

“Like I am beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“Like you have never wanted to do anything else.”

“ _ Yes _ ,” Keith says.

Lance’s lips part, and Keith kisses him. He’s known for a very long time that Lance’s lips are plump and full, but gods the  _ feel  _ of them. They’re so soft, so lush that Keith can’t imagine going a single day after this without tasting Lance’s mouth. Keith brings a hand to the nape of Lance’s neck, where the hair is fine and damp. Lance kisses Keith back with an eagerness that excites him like nothing else has, slim hands clutching at Keith’s sleep shirt. There is the most enticing edge of irregularity to the way Lance kisses—his faltering rhythm, his nervous breathing—and Keith feels something possessive rear up inside him as it hits him that he might be one of the first people Lance has ever done this with. He gives Lance the barest bit of his tongue, slips it between his luscious lips, and Lance responds in kind, tentative but eager. So,  _ so  _ eager. 

Keith pulls away so they can breathe, and Lance leans in as if to follow him. Lance’s cheeks are definitely flushed now, and his eyes are low-lidded. And his mouth.  _ Gods _ , his sweet mouth. His lips are a lurid, slick red. Almost  _ obscene _ , and Keith feels himself hardening inside his sleep pants. Keith brings a thumb to Lance’s bottom lip, drags it down a bit to reveal the line of perfect white teeth. Lance looks up at him from under his lashes as he kisses the tip of it, and Keith pushes it into the warm wet he’s just discovered. Keith pushes in a bit further, then further still, till he’s sent the whole of his thumb into Lance’s mouth, right up to the knuckle. Keith pulls it back out to watch the wrap of pretty, rose-red lips around his finger. He strokes Lance’s tongue on the slow, gentle exit.

Lance moans.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Keith swears. 

When Lance makes to lean in this time, Keith lets him. Lance wraps his arms around Kaith’s neck once more, his lips just a bit more controlled, more consistent. What a quick fucking learner. Keith lays back until his head’s propped up by pillows and Lance is tucked against him, on top of him. 

When Keith licks inside his mouth, Lance trembles and moans again. Keith rolls them over so that Lance is underneath him, feels himself filling out inside his trousers at their new positions because  _ yes _ . Fuck  _ yes,  _ how long has he wanted this exact thing, Lance unfurled and gorgeous beneath him, without being able to explicitly admit it to himself? 

He pulls back. Or, he  _ tries  _ to, but Lance holds Keith fast with his arms around Keith’s neck. And Keith is so entranced by Lance’s lips, by the cherry-sweet taste—where the hell did Lance get  _ cherries _ from?—of his mouth that Keith stays for a few more seconds, compelled to absolutely relish something this delicious. Stays long enough to take the kiss back from Lance, to ravage his mouth with tongue and fervor. Lance whimpers into Keith’s mouth, something lovely and yielding and so goddamn arousing it instantly has Keith fully turgid inside his pants. 

This time, when Keith pulls back, he unlaces Lance’s arms from around his neck. He takes both of Lance’s wrists in a single hand and presses them above Lance’s head, against the pillows. Lance, mouth absolutely  _ ruined _ already, looks like he’s about to protest.

“Be good,” Keith warns.

Lance flushes darker, eyes widening. 

Keith grins as it dawns on him.

“Is that it, darling? Is that what you want? Someone to reprimand you? Someone to hold you fast and keep you still?”

“Not  _ someone _ ,” Lance says. “The cocky, terrible prince above me. Why are you being so cruel, Keith? Don’t I deserve kindness?” Lance bats his eyelashes up at Keith, something that would work if Keith was literally anyone else.

Keith tightens his grip a bit on Lance’s wrists, nothing too excessive, but enough for Lance to register the sturdiness of the hold.

“Not here,” Keith decides. Lance shudders. Keith brings his free hand to Lance’s chest, skin smoother than silk.

“Here,” Keith continues, hand dragging across Lance’s chest to catch a nipple. Lance gasps. “Here, I will be mean to you.” Keith allows his thumb to catch on Lance’s little nipple again. He rubs it until it pebbles further, and Lance is gasping louder. Lance’s legs fall open, almost like he can’t help it. Keith swallows. Keith readjusts so that he’s perfectly in the space there, Lance’s thighs on either side of him.

“What if I’m good?” Lance asks.

Keith looks up at him, and Lance bites his lip at whatever he sees in Keith’s face. Keith smirks.

“I might be even worse, if you turn yourself into such a sweet little target.”

Lance huffs, pouts again. “It seems I cannot win.”

Keith hums his agreement. 

Keith drags his hand from Lance’s chest, along the toned contours of his stomach until his fingers meet with the knot just barely holding Lance’s robe together. It’s a simple bow (like Lance is some gift and gods, the accuracy), so Keith pulls one of the ties and the knot gives. 

Then Lance is there, halfway indecent with his upper body bordered in cream-orange. Keith sees the outline of Lance’s hardening member through the thin material of his trousers. Keith salivates like an animal. 

Keith lets go of his wrists to run both fingers up his sides, to chart the warm skin there. Lance laughs, something airy and light and approaching a giggle. Absolute delight fills Keith at the sight and sound of this. It blends with Keith’s arousal to create an unbelievable sort of inebriation, one where Lance is storm-eye and center of this newer, lovelier, dizzier world. He has never wanted anyone this desperately. 

Keith leans down and kisses the spot right above the flat of Lance’s stomach, right where his sternum ends. When Lance’s hands run through his hair (definitely no longer in the spot Keith had left them), he can’t find the words to scold him. Keith trails his lips along the gentle furrow that leads down to Lance’s navel, lower and lower. When Keith reaches the button itself and drops a soft peck there, Lance murmurs,

“I’ve been thinking about getting it pierced.”

Keith feels a charge of heat spike through him, from his stomach to his cock. The images are vivid in his mind, addictively base: a fully healed Lance having his dangling navel jewelry tugged at by Keith’s teeth; Lance with dangling navel jewelry that sways as Keith moves inside him, as Keith fucks him. 

Lance sounds amused as he follows up his statement with,

“Would you like that?”

Keith looks up at him. Lance’s breath catches from the glance alone, stomach contracting. Keith dips the tip of his tongue into the small hollow there, enough of a response on its own according to the satisfied, dazed look on Lance’s face. Lance’s thighs tighten around Keith’s shoulders.

“Yes,” Keith answers anyway. “I am in favor of anything you do to this pretty body.” 

Lance’s cock twitches.

“And what do you want to do to it?” Lance asks, voice nearly shy. 

Keith holds his blue gaze as he hooks his thumbs under Lance’s waistband. For a moment, noise drops from the room like the floor beneath them is a false bottom. Keith doesn’t think either of them is breathing. His attention returns to the place between Lance’s thighs. Lance’s cock strains against the fabric of his pants as Keith works his trousers down. When Keith frees the whole length of it, it springs up impatiently. 

Lance’s cock is a beautiful thing. It is clear that the grace inherent to all of his features extends here, where he’s hot and hard and already leaking. His tip is flushed the red of strawberry candies. Keith’s own cock pulses.

The flutter of Lance’s lashes is timid, the twitch of his fingers in Keith’s hair just a bit nervous. Keith leans back till he’s kneeling, and Lance looks positively affronted as Keith takes his hands in his. Keith laces their fingers and feels something warm settle in his chest as Lance tightens his own grip. 

“Are you coming down with some sort of sickness?” Lance asks. “Because I can think of no other acceptable reason for this pause.”

Keith rolls his eyes but he knows his smile is fond. He asks what he should have asked much sooner, what he’s able to focus on now that he’s managed to momentarily reel in his horny beast-brain,

“Have you done this before?” 

“No,” Lance says. 

Keith swallows, shocked at just how much warmer he’s growing under his shirt. At how his cock jumps at the revelation. He has never understood the obsession that some men have with purity, the push to debauch chastity. But now, with Lance serving as sterling context, all Keith wants is to claim, to taint. Keith asks,

“Not even the kissing?”

Lance’s cheeks redden further. 

“Are you making fun of me?” 

Keith can’t help but let out a short laugh, something low and stunned. How could he even put into  _ words  _ how aroused he is at the mere thought of being Lance’s first? 

Keith leans forward. He brackets Lance’s head with his hands as he supports himself, but he makes sure that he’s fully tucked between Lance’s thighs. He watches Lance’s face as he lowers his weight against him, as he angles his clothed cock against Lance’s naked one and rolls his hips forward once, sure and fluid. Lance can feel him now where he’s hard and aching, feel how much Keith wants to take him. 

“ _ Nn _ ,” Lance moans.

“Does that feel like a joke to you, darling?” 

“ _ Oh _ ,” Lance gasps as Keith continues his grind. He’s so lovely like this, lips parted. He grips Keith’s arms like he’s trying to steady himself. He rolls his own hips back in a couple trials, just to get a feel for Keith’s rhythm. Then he’s off, hips stuttering but gaining some consistency already, legs wrapping around Keith’s lower back as he draws him in. Keith can feel the precum of Lance’s exposed cock seeping into his own pants, till the front of his trousers is sticky with it. 

“O-oh,” Lance tries again, lips almost pulling up into a smile before Keith grinds down harder and his face crumples into something shocked and lustful. “Y… you  _ like _ it, you absolute pervert.”

“Yes, my love,” Keith confirms, breaths heavier now. Keith reaches down and wraps a hand around Lance’s cock, the pretty thing slick with its own fluid, and Lance keens. When Keith starts to stroke him, his eyes close and he falls completely silent, like there’s some noise building in his throat. Keith rubs his thumb against the sopping wet tip and Lance whines, hand tightening around Keith’s bicep. 

“Is this what it’s like when you touch yourself darling?”

Lance shakes his head. “N.. no.”

“How’s it different?”

“Your… hands— _ mm _ … your hands are bigger.”

Lance’s eyes are half-lidded now, curly hair a dark tumble against the pillow beneath him. His mouth is as alluring as ever, and Keith is weak. He leans down and kisses Lance again, feels his heart pound at the precious, delighted sigh that Lance propels into Keith’s mouth as Keith coaxes his lips apart, eases his tongue inside. 

Keith pulls away and inhales sharply as he feels Lance’s hand against the bulge of his erection. Lance’s eyes are shining back at him, gleaming with mischief. Keith moves in and nips his bottom lip, and Lance giggles outright. His grip on Keith’s cock grows firmer, plotting out the length and shape of Keith’s member through the material. Keith grips the sheets on either side of Lance’s head, 

“So big everywhere,” Lance murmurs, gaze falling to Keith’s concealed cock and his own slender hand against it. The look on his face is so earnest—lips parted in interest, eyes wide and honest—that for several moments, Keith does not bring up how much of an unwitting tease Lance is being.

Those moments end though.

In his explorations, Lance’s thumb massages a spot right below the head of Keith’s cock, and Keith shudders. A deep, dangerous sound builds in his throat. He pulls Lance’s pants the rest of the way off as Lance gasps in surprise. Keith slips a hand under Lance’s back and guides him into an upright sitting position. Keith pulls Lance’s robe the rest of the way off, lowers his mouth to a tempting brown nipple and sucks it as he does.

“F- _ fuck _ , you—” Keith sucks harder and Lance loses his words for a moment. “You absolute  _ beast _ .”

Keith smirks at that as he pulls his shirt off by the collar.  _ Fuck _ , Lance looks far too beguiling like this. Chest heaving, cock jutting up towards his navel, face as pretty as ever. His hair has dried into a thick garland of curls that frame his cheeks and throw every single one of his fine features, the lips, the nose, the brows, into greater relief. The whole of him on sumptuous display, and his tattoos a symphony of gorgeous convolution, of intricacies, from his arms to his thighs to his calves. Almost too exquisite to fuck, but the thought that Keith  _ will _ , that he will sink his cock into something this flawless, births in Keith a winding hunger that he knows he will spend the rest of his life attempting to sate. 

“Get on your knees for me, love,” Keith says, but he doesn’t give a chance for Lance to follow the directive. He takes hold of Lance’s thin waist himself, gives in to the roguish instinct he has to squeeze in and see if his thumbs can touch. 

They nearly do and Keith licks his lips.

Lance brings his hands to Keith’s chest, draws them along his pecks, then down to his stomach, leaving a trail of heated skin in their wake. He looks the most bashful Keith has ever seen him, face thoughtful.

“What is it?” Keith asks.

“You are so attractive.”

Keith lets out a delighted chuckle at this, a torrent of warmth inside his chest.

Keith brings a hand to cup Lance’s cheek. He lands a kiss right over the beauty mark below his lip, the tip of his nose, his brow.

“And you are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

He helps Lance move to his arms and knees, helps him move a bit closer to the pillows so that he’ll have something to hold on to should he need it. Keith moves a bit further back to admire and oh. Oh gods. 

Lance’s ass is rounded and plump, all thick, jiggly flesh. How could Keith have ever missed this? How has Lance ever been able to  _ hide  _ this? Keith’s cock, though he did not think it possible, hardens further. Pulses and aches so insistently that Keith finally pulls his pants off. Now that Keith thinks about it, Lance’s well-formed thighs certainly suggest a very shapely rear, but this is so much more than Keith expected. The cheeks are the sort of implausible perfect—so ample, so  _ full _ —that makes Keith want to bite into them with teeth, knead and part them with rough, avaricious hands. 

Keith grips Lance’s ass, and his mouth can’t decide whether to drool from desire or dry from the shock that he… he gets to have this. To have Lance. Keith sinks his fingers into the flesh and finds it soft and yielding. When Keith grips them and releases them, pretty brown flesh jiggles and springs back. Lance gasps above him and presses his head against the pillows, back arching so that his incredible ass is on even starker display. A natural.

“That feels nice,” Lance says dreamily. His eyes are half-lidded again, just this side of dazed.

“That so?” Keith asks as he lands a kiss on a cheek. 

“Mmhm.”

He’s not sure what comes over him, but before he knows it, he’s taking the meat of Lance’s ass between his teeth, closing in on a gentle bite.

Lance rocks back against him, moaning deeper.

Keith leaves him for just a second as he crawls over to the bedside table. There is a vial of oil here (for aches and sore muscles, but it will do the trick). Lance watches him retrieve the bottle with dark, curious eyes. Keith slicks a finger with oil as Lance watches him. 

“You thought about this,” Lance says, lip quirking.

“Mm,” Keith confirms. He digs his fingers into the swell of a cheek and spreads Lance apart. Then there it is, the furl of his entrance, as tiny and pretty as the dip at the center of a flower. So small, so  _ tight _ . Entry, it seems, impossible. And yet. 

“When?” Lance asks.

“Hm?” Keith pretends like he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s fully worth it for the way Lance rolls his eyes. When his eyes settle on Keith again, he’s biting his lip and that mischievous look is back.

“When did you first think about fucking me?” Lance asks, voice a bit breathy. He sinks his chest a bit lower into the sheets, arch even deeper and fuck…  _ fuck.  _ “Was it back in the caverns, when I climbed on top of you? You could’ve stretched me open while I sat on your lap, put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t bring the whole tunnel down as you eased inside. Oh! Do you think I’ll be loud?”

Keith gulps.

“Lance,” he warns.

“Was it before then? When I was being a disrespectful little imp? Did you wish you could fold me over anywhere, the barrel on the sawdust during our swordfight, the railing of the river boat in the deep of night? Pull down my pants and make me feel you, barely anything to ease the way? I’ve heard that it burns so terribly if you are not slick enough. Do you think I’d cry? It takes a lot to make me cry, Keith.”

The  _ mouth  _ on this man. Keith feels like he’s choking, grip tightening on Lance’s cheek so much that he’s sure it’ll bruise if he doesn’t let up soon. But Lance just pushes back against his palm.  _ And keeps talking _ .

Lance blinks slowly, somehow both demure and sultry.

“Was it last night?” Lance asks. “When I fell asleep against you? You were so sweet to me, so kind. Did you think about turning me over onto my back and waking me up, making me ready for you with thick, sleep-clumsy fingers? While I blinked up at you, still sleepy but so horny, so willing?”

Keith is rooted where he kneels, so aroused he feels it in his marrow. Last night, Lance wanted to…? Lance pouts, and Keith instantly knows that whatever he says next will be devastating in filth.

“Or did you want to take me as I slept? Fuck me open while I was completely oblivious, put me on my stomach, climb on top of me and have your way with me? Work in your cock while I couldn’t even enjoy it?”

“ _ Enough _ ,” Keith decides, whole body hot.

Keith can tell by the curve of Lance’s mouth that no, this is certainly  _ not  _ “enough.” But Lance sucks down whatever he’d been about to say as Keith touches his entrance with the tip of his oil-slick finger. Keith circles the little thing with his finger, and Lance watches him with his bottom lip pulled between his teeth. Lance’s skin is absolutely lustrous under the lamplight, and the more Keith wets him with oil, the more Keith begins to ready Lance to take him, the more Lance’s entrance glitters and glistens like a tiny jewel. Keith pats it with his finger just to see how Lance will react, zeroes in on the small wet sounds that occur every time his finger rears back and breaks the fine viscous thread of oil that connects it to Lance’s hole. 

Lance lets out a jerky breath. He undulates his hips a bit, and the movement is so alluring, so distracting, that Lance manages to get Keith’s finger to slip in a bit quicker than Keith had originally planned. Keith can feel him now, just barely. The very beginning of his snug, silken interior. 

“I have thought about it too,” Lance tells him, voice low.

Keith feels like he’s losing his mind.

“Bear down,” Keith tells him. And when Lance does, when Keith can feel the sweet, molten give around his finger as he sinks in to the first knuckle, then the final one, he leans down and mouths at the swell of a cheek in a sloppy kiss.

“You do not know what you do to me,” Keith tells him.

Lance whimpers, and Keith wraps a hand around his own aching cock. He gives himself a single rough stroke, something perfunctory. He knows that he must hold out, and never in his life has it felt so, so difficult.

Lance’s pretty ass is just  _ dragging  _ his finger in, tugging at him so well that Keith thinks that one of these days, he will do nothing but this: watch Lance’s hole close around his fingers. Keith pulls his finger out to the very tip, then pushes it right back in. Keith finds a rhythm, and Lance is moaning consistently now, something low and so sweet. They’re interspersed with hums. When Keith sinks his finger in deep once more, he searches for Lance’s special spot. He knows that he’s found it when Lance keens, high and gorgeous and just like he had when Keith had stroked his cock. Lance does not seem to know whether he wants to chase the sensation or run from it, and bucks a bit under Keith’s hand. Keith doesn’t give him much of a choice when he grips his hip and holds him still.

“Let it feel good, darling,” Keith tells him as he kisses his tailbone. Lance sinks back into the sheets at this. 

Lance asks, voice thick through with arousal,

“Why do I feel like you’re going to abuse this?”

Keith chuckles as he rubs the spot again on his next thrust in, circular and measured.

“Oh  _ gods _ ,” Lance moans, voice muffled by the pillow.

When Keith works Lance up to two fingers, one of Lance’s legs jerks back on reflex. When Keith works him up to three fingers, Lance makes a sound so indecent that Keith, if he were any less shameless, would be tempted to line the bottom of the bedroom door with a towel to soundproof the room.

Then Lance is stretched, rim glistening. Keith leans back on his heels as he slicks his cock, as he watches Lance’s face and ass like an absolute lecher. Keith advances till he’s sufficiently close. He taps his heavy cock against a soft cheek, and Lance makes a pleased sound. Lance makes another sound, a contemplative hum. Keith watches, precum collecting at the tip of his cock, as Lance reaches back and slips two fingers into himself. Lance’s brows are pulled together in wonder as he presses them into himself as far as they’ll go.

“ _ Oh _ ,” he groans, thrusts just a bit spasmodic as he registers how good it still feels like this, then remembers that he must put in the work to keep feeling good. When Keith finds his voice again, he says,

“You might just be the dirtiest virgin alive, sweetheart.”

Lance laughs at that, wispy and winded. Keith knows that he could stroke himself to completion to this sight alone, to Lance playing with himself by stuffing his own fingers deep. But this is not how Keith wishes to release for the first time tonight. 

Keith gives the back of Lance’s enthusiastic hand an admonishing little tap. 

“You bully,” Lance complains as he pulls his fingers free. 

“Make room for me,” Keith tells him.

His words are meant to be a follow-up tease, but Lance interprets them differently. Better. Lance interprets them better. He reaches back with both hands and grips his own ass. He presses his own fingers tight, flesh pushing up between his digits, as he spreads himself open. As he offers the sensuous heat between his cheeks. 

“ _ Perfect _ ” Keith praises. “Perfect, pretty boy.” Lance whimpers at the praise.

Keith takes himself in hand.

“Take a deep breath for me, okay darling?” 

Keith waits till he hears the rush of Lance taking that breath. When he detects it, he brings the weeping tip of his cock to Lance’s wet heat. 

“Excellent,” Keith tells him, hand smoothing his side. Keith swallows, finds his restraint and clasps it tight as he says,

“Now bear down on me, just like you did with my fingers.”

Keith presses forward as Lance does just that. 

The first wave of heat as he pops in the head of his cock is startling. Keith takes a deep breath as he controls himself. He’s still stroking Lance’s side but he can feel, in the corded, tat bunch of muscles at the edge of his torso, that Lance is tense. 

Keith pulls back out, then pushes back in, feels the too-tight channel yielding to him in the barest increments. 

“Breathe, darling.”

“I am,” Lance pants in a rush. “ _ Gods _ , lose some girth, would you?”

Keith pulls out all together, and Lance looks slighted. 

“Why did you stop?”

“Turn over. Onto your back.”

The kneeling position is usually the easiest for most people. But there are always exceptions.

Lance settles back against the pillows. He hooks his arms around the backs of his knees and  _ fuck _ . This position is instantly Keith’s favorite. He can see everything like this. Lance’s leaking cock, his taut stomach, his flushed, pretty face. 

Keith advances once more and brings his cock to Lance’s entrance. He doesn’t even have to tell Lance to bear down this time. Keith is ready to pop the tip of his cock back out, to work Lance open as slowly as it takes.

But there is no need for that. Because as Keith starts to ease in, the resistance of Lance’s virgin-tight hole (still formidable) relents just a bit moment by moment. Second by second, until Keith is halfway inside and Lance is wearing the lewdest, most stunned look on his face. Keith places his hands over Lance’s arms where they’re wrapped around his thighs, where they hold his legs spread open. Keith watches the remaining half of his cock disappear inside Lance, watches, absolutely rapt, as his thick shaft spears Lance open. The clench is unbelievable, a single step down from too-tight. Suddenly, Keith feels himself teetering on the edge of an absolutely primal carnality, one that urges him to chase that heat, to make Lance whine and cry as he’s ravaged, as he’s brought to his peak by Keith’s cock alone. 

Lance looks like he’s in the midst of the quietest scream. 

When Keith’s thighs finally meet Lance’s thighs, when he’s all the way inside, he shifts forward and pulls Lance into the filthiest kiss. 

Keith starts slow.

He wants to make sure that Lance is fully adjusted. Keith knows that he’s big. He tracks Lance’s face as he pulls out, as he extricates himself from Lance’s baiting warmth. Keith thrusts in again, deliberate and steady, and Lance’s breath stutters from his body. It’s a struggle to speak, but Keith can’t help it. Messing with Lance is too satisfying. Keith manages,

“Think this is the longest you’ve ever been so quiet.”

Keith bottoms out once more and leans forward to taste Lance’s lips again, just because he can. When Lance’s mouth is free, he gasps out,

“Focused on making sure you didn’t— _ fuck— _ puncture a lung.”

Keith chuckles. Which is quite difficult to do because there doesn’t seem to be any air left in his chest. 

Keith keeps this pace until the too-tight clench becomes a still-tight but far more manageable grip. This is when Keith aims for Lance’s sweet spot with his cock, with this first hurdle surmounted. When Keith hits it, Lance’s arms loosen around his thighs so much that if Keith wasn’t holding on to them, they’d fall to the sheets. Out of the corner of his eye, Keith notices the way Lance’s toes curl.

“ _ G-gods _ ,” Lance moans.

When Lance is fully adjusted, Keith has no doubt. Keith lets up on his sweet spot for a bit (unlike what Lance thinks, Keith actually plans to use this little power sparingly), but Lance’s moans only increase in pitch. 

“Oh, look at you,” Keith coos, after a thrust, just this side of too rough, that has a pleasured cry ribboning out of Lance’s mouth, “you just like to be filled, don’t you?”

Lance nods, bottom lip bitten red. He blinks up at Keith, eyes so big and pretty. 

“H-how is it?” Lance manages. “How is it inside of me?”

“Nothing should have the right to feel this good.”

“Flatterer,  _ oh— _ ”

Lance’s words cleave into a whimper as Keith leans down to lap at a nipple with his tongue. The action folds Lance essentially in half and reminds Keith just how limber Lance is (like he could’ve ever forgotten). 

Keith has to make his thrusts more shallow for it, but he teases at Lance’s gorgeous nipple until it’s swelling beautifully, then moves to the other one. Lance tastes just like the citrus soap he’s been using. 

Keith straightens up on his knees. He spreads Lance’s thighs a bit and pushes them towards his chest till he’s properly folded. It seems to Keith that he can adopt a quicker pace now.

So he does.

Lance sings for him as Keith pounds into him. For someone who Keith once believed to be so reserved, the revelation that Lance is so vocal, so enthusiastic in bed is astonishing. And so,  _ so _ stimulating. Keith doesn’t think he can ever hear his name from Lance again without slotting it into this context: Lance stuttering it out as Keith pounds into the tight, loud clench of his ass, his plump cheeks rippling with the force; Lance only choking out the first half of it,  _ Ke— _ , before a pretty whine fills his throat at the slower, rougher thrusts of Keith within him (when Keith varies his pace); Lance baking it into frantic directives,  _ K-Keith, do it up there, th-there! Nngh that spot feels so good _ , that Keith follows to their incredible shared benefit. 

Keith slips two of his fingers into Lance’s panting mouth as he fucks him. Lance looks up at him with bleary, half-lidded eyes, lips kiss-swollen and wet. He looks like something out of the most vulgar, godless dream. He does his best to suck Keith’s fingers, but Keith keeps him amply distracted with the thick, unrelenting cock in his pretty ass. Lance slurps at the digits as best he can, even brings one of his own hands to Keith’s wrist and holds him steady as Keith rocks their bodies with his thrusts. Keith slows down just a bit, just so he can spend a moment plunging his fingers into Lance’s warm, wet mouth. 

Lance slips his other hand down his chest, and Keith thinks he’s reaching for his length. But Lance bypasses his own cock altogether. Lance brings his hand down to where they’re joined, where the heft of Keith’s cock holds him pinioned and spread wide. Lance drags a finger along his rim, shudders, and his eyes flit shut. Keith slows down further to let him explore, absolutely enraptured. On a slow, inexorable push in, the tip of Lance’s finger drags along Keith’s shaft. Keith moans, jerks in far quicker than he’d been planning to. Lance lets out a fascinating giggle-moan. He doesn’t stop tracing his rim though, where it’s stretched taut around Keith. The display sends a more intentional heat into Keith’s stomach, one that urges him towards release.

Keith thrusts in, Lance’s fingers still bracketing his own entrance like a lascivious invitation. Lance seems to want to say something, so Keith pulls his fingers free. 

“Wow,” Lance breathes, a look of awe on his face. He stares down the line of his body, mouth parted in wonder. “Y-you’re really inside me.” 

Keith snaps his hips.

“ _ Ohfuck— _ ”

“ _ Deep _ inside,” Keith confirms.

Keith resumes his leisurely pace, though he can feel his peak begging for his attention. Lance keeps his fingers where they are.

“ _ Yes _ , like that darling,” Keith grits out. “Like you’re showing me where to go.”

And Keith is unsure what it is about those words that does it—what it is, perhaps, about his  _ tone  _ that does it—but a second later, Lance is spurting his release across his sculpted stomach with a near pained cry, eyes rolling into the back of his head then falling shut. His ass closes around Keith’s cock in a single, impossibly tight throb, and Keith is right there with him. His thoughts are turned to white light and noise and his throat grows hoarse with the groan pulled from him. He begins to spill inside Lance, and then it’s like he can’t stop. He somehow manages to open his eyes. He finds Lance still spurting weakly over his come-covered stomach, body trembling from the force of his orgasm. 

And the sight alone draws out Keith’s release, wrings him dry, till Lance is mewling at the feel of it, pouting, no doubt, at the oversensitivity. 

When Keith is done, when he’s winding down from his peak, he still has enough presence of mind to keep his weight off of Lance. 

Keith thinks Lance is trying to look scandalized, but it’s not quite working. His stomach is drenched in spend and his mouth looks like it’s just been fucked. 

“You spent  _ inside  _ of me like some brute?”

“You tightened around me like some harlot.”

“Oh you  _ bastard _ .”

Keith laughs. But when Keith goes to pull out, Lance is gripping his shoulder.

“Wait! Stay a little longer.” Then, a bit quieter, “I like how you feel inside me.”

There’s no way Keith can get hard again this quickly, but oh how he wishes. 

He slips his arms underneath Lance’s back, damp with sweat now. His come is already starting to leak out of Lance and around his softening cock. Keith licks his lips at the sight, something that makes Lance smack his arm and call him  _ incorrigible _ . 

Keith rolls over onto his back with Lance on top of him. 

Lance looks up at him and smiles, dimples stark, hair completely mussed. An exceedingly pretty, debauched vision. Keith kisses his forehead.

“I would do anything to protect you,” Keith says.

Lance pecks his chin. “And I you.”

↡

They do eventually get cleaned up. 

Lance fills the water with lavender and lemongrass and a bunch of other oils that tempt Keith to stay in this room forever. Lance grumbles about how Keith came inside him too deep, how his fingers aren’t long enough to get it all out. Keith pulls him into his lap and offers his aid with two rude digits. Lance convulses into his release, channels his shout into a kiss so chaotic and abandoned that Keith feels like someone has replaced all of the blood in his veins with open water, ripe with wildness. Keith holds his hand tight against Lance’s back, between his shoulder blades, to keep him upright and strokes himself to that night’s second finish. Keith moistens a hand in his own release and smears it across Lance’s spent cock for good measure, which turns Lance half-bashful again and leaves him floundering for words. 

They’re both sated (for now), but too antsy to sleep. Keith has fully absorbed Lance’s propensity for touch. Keith sits up against the headboard with Lance between his legs, Lance’s bare back against his naked chest. They laze shirtless in the fresh trousers that the compound has provided Keith while the oil lamp burns low. 

Lance twists a bit in his arms, leans his upper body towards the low table beside the bed. When he re-settles, he has the sheathed crystal sword in hand, pulled from its perch against the wall. He draws it out of its scabbard part-way, and the sight of the blade—the length of whetted, stretched frost—startles Keith like he hadn’t been sparring with it all afternoon. This is the kind of weapon a storybook hero would find hovering above a frozen pond with a band of ice zombies clambering close. The fact of it in his possession is nearly as incredible as the fact of Lance in his bed. 

“Have you ever heard of Mt. Balmera?” Lance asks.

Yes, Keith has heard of Mt. Balmera before. Usually from the mouths of the palace’s visiting theater actors, and only when they sensed that their fourth rendition of a fisherman falling over the edge of his boat was, surprise of all surprises, not garnering the attention they’d expected. They painted Mt. Balmera as a fanciful place full of dragons who were, without fail, terribly dim-witted (because stupid = funny, yes?), given to setting themselves on fire with their own dragonbreath. The only other impression Keith has of Mt. Balmera is from a children’s nursery rhyme, one that warns kids against stealing because all thieves wake up on a dragon’s tongue.

But Lance’s question signals something leagues more significant to Keith: Lance on the precipice of opening himself up, of snapping open his most private memories for Keith’s view. Keith strokes the skin of Lance’s stomach as he replies to the question,

“Yes. Nothing accurate, I’m sure.”

Lance lets out a quiet laugh as he leans back against Keith. He strokes the blade with a thumb as he begins to speak. 

“I was born there, not Ekrim. My mother was an ice dragon. A shifter, though that’s a bit redundant—all dragons are capable of humanoid forms, you lot are not that impressive.” Keith hears the teasing edge in his voice and lands a kiss on his shoulder for it. “I think she looked a lot like me when she shifted, though that might just be my mind indulging itself. I keep recalling that we had the same hair texture, if not the color. My father, Allura’s uncle, was a faerie fire elemental, second son to the Ekrimian king and queen.”

Lance’s father was sent as an emissary to Mt. Balmera around twenty-two years ago, when the Dragon Queen Florona was in power and sought to rid some of her country’s bad blood with Ekrim. She was strangely fond of the Belí, a peculiarity among dragon leaders. 

“I don’t think my people have ever forgiven the dragons for leaving them to fend for themselves, and the dragons still see us as bellicose children. So everything was kept very quiet—no one knew except for my grandparents,” Lance’s voice gets tighter at this, the first time Keith has ever heard him explicitly acknowledge his relation to the Crown, “the three emissaries, Florona, and her sister, my mother.”

There were talks to establish a sort of interspecies nursery for little dragons and Belís on the border of the two countries, even though it would have required the dragons to loosen the charms around Mt. Balmera just a bit. It would have been the first of several trust-building diplomatic maneuvers. This plants in Keith’s mind an adorable image: round-faced Belí toddling around, baby dragons testing out their under-developed wings.

“The interspecies nursery was my mother’s brainchild. My father was largely in charge of the logistics. They’d spend hours planning it together, long after everyone else had retired.”

“Not unlike us,” Keith notes.

“What a bleeding heart you are, lover.”

“I could never be that sensitive. I would not survive you.”

“Oh hush.”

Lance continues.

“Allura was a teenager at the time. She says that my father carried his love for my mother wherever he went when he was in Ekrim. It silhouetted him. He painted several murals of her on the walls of the tunnels here.” Keith can sense the smile Lance wears. “They are… incredible. I must show them to you before we leave.”

“I would love to see them,” Keith says, with feeling. He can’t describe the happiness he feels at learning where Lance comes from. Lance reclines entirely against his chest, head held up by Keith’s shoulder. The sword rests on his lap.

“After that, they were cautiously inseparable—they didn’t want to arouse  _ too  _ much suspicion—but then, well… I happened. I was a touch more difficult to explain away. There were ice caverns towards the south side of the mountain, and that is where they raised me for three years.” Lance’s voice is losing warmth like a room does as the day spills past noon. Keith holds him closer. He thinks he knows what’s coming. “My parents feared that I would be killed, yes, by either of their courts. But there are worse things that could have happened to me. They understood this too.”

“My mother was an air elemental. They can fashion all sorts of fascinating illusions, people, things, environs. The best of them could make you mistake a feather duster for a loaf of bread, and my mother was the best of them. The caverns were out of the way, but by no means entirely hidden. For three years, she maintained the illusion of a perfectly even mountainside. For three years, she sustained an adjoining illusion of herself at the palace, so that no one would think anything was amiss. She could see through its eyes, I remember. I used to climb into her lap and braid her hair while she stared off into space for moments, attending to business at home. Allura says that my father visited every week, but in my mind it was more than that. Three years.”

Keith does not claim to be any sort of expert on elemental magic, but he has always understood magic to be something of a muscle. To maintain such an incredible output over the span of years?

“I can at least say that I was not the one who found her. That would be too tragic. My father did. Found me too, sleeping in the front room.”

Lance is quiet for a moment before he continues.

“My father took me with him, but he could do nothing for my mother’s body. To carry her back to the palace… can you imagine how it would have looked? He left anonymous tips in the neighboring dragon village, and a couple of storm dragons found her.”

The Balmeran court was never able to prove, definitively, that Lance’s father had anything to do with his mother’s death. But the suspicion that palled him was enough to put an end to any attempts at diplomacy. 

Lance’s father brought him back to Ekrim. He told everyone that Lance was the son of some washerwoman from an Arusian border settlement. That is what everyone still thinks. For a people descended from the faeries, who more or less turned baby-making into an occupation, the Belí’s hatred of bastards is fascinatingly ironic (Lance notes all of this wryly). 

“But, hate me as my grandparents may,” Lance says, “my father was still their favorite son.”

Another beat of silence passes. Lance takes a deep breath before he resumes.

“The ice caverns of Mt. Balmera are cold beyond comprehension. Unless you possess blood that can withstand the cold, hypothermia sets in within minutes. My mother was the one keeping my father resistant to it. In the time that it took him to find her, steel himself, then collect me...” The explanation hangs. 

“He survived the worst of the hypothermia, but he had some breathing problems. Always a bit tired, too, but never for me. I don’t know if my feet touched the ground for a year afterwards; he’d carry me around on his back everywhere.” This is fringed by a fond laugh. Lance sobers and says,

“Then he was gone too.”

Keith clings to Lance so tight he half-expects that for years after, he will hold him as an imprint on his chest. Sometimes, there are no words. 

↡

Sleep is rolling them across its knuckles, nearer now, when Lance speaks again. 

“I am going too,” he says.

Yes, there is panic. The very notion of Lance in danger, Lance  _ and  _ Shiro in danger, makes him sick. 

But Keith loses his fear to his relief. He is both heavy and light with it, the promise of Lance close even as they fight the Order. 

“I am glad of it,” Keith says.

↡

Keith is resting against a particularly comfortable rock the next day, taking a break from sparring, when he sees the flash out of the corner of his eye. Some bright blue and white light bows over the tree canopy, and is that… a horn? 

It is only visible for a second, but Keith is instantly reminded of that moment at the Feyivi base wehn Lance had come for him. The dragon shadow he’d seen… Hed thought he’d imagined it, close to death as he was.

Keith is not the only person to notice it, going by the murmurs beside him. He is the only one compelled to pursue it. The human soldiers are likely wary of anything mystical, but everyone else seems strangely hesitant as well. Naturally, this only heightens Keith’s curiosity. He takes his sword and he’s off, snapping tree branches underfoot as he jogs in the general direction of the light he’d seen. 

When he reaches the spot, some two hundred yards away, he finds nothing but a regular copse of trees. There is a chipmunk two trees over who stares at him like Keith owes him money. Keith is just about to turn around when Lance emerges. The air parts for him like a set of drapes. His toned arms are gloriously bare, and his smile is wide. Lance waves him closer like he’s a schoolboy with a secret.

“Oh don’t look at me like I’m trying to sell you bootlegged wagon parts.”

With a huff that is definitely not enamored (Keith swears!), he follows Lance.

Through the aperture of parted air, there are no trees. There is a field before them with short prairie grass. A few paces away, Allura is beaming with excitement. 

Lance sets a hand on Keith’s chest. “Stay.”

“Will you get a collar for me too?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You degenerate.”

Keith stays where Lance had indicated, the sky an open blue palm overhead. Before Keith can respond (and as he’s willing away the heat from his face), Lance jogs away. Keith’s eyes follow his retreating back, then fall lower. To where his trousers adhere to the round curve of his ass.

Allura gasps beside Keith, something overdramatic.

“My  _ baby cousin _ , Keith?”

Keith makes an unintelligible sound of protest as Lance bows his head, eyes closing in concentration. Allura continues before he can figure out anything coherent,

“I’ve had to extend the protective charm over this field. He’s never surged like that before.” She looks at Keith with a thoughtful, suspicious raise of her brow.

Keith does not have the chance to ask her what she means.

Up ahead, the air is turning over itself like rolled die. Though steady just a moment before, it is now blustery. Here, Keith realizes that he cannot even hear the sounds of the forest, that the chitter and scamp of birds and small mammals are just… gone. 

Lance’s hair whips around his head so ferociously that Keith can make out thin trails of scalp. His tattoos rouse and lash and glow blue, like they’d done on the boat, like they’d done in Feyiv. Lance’s eyes glow the same blue when he opens them, pupils as thin as vertical coin slots. 

Then, the air around him stills. Lance’s hair falls against his forehead. A single beat passes. There is a deep, bone-burrowing sound like a thousand drawbridges being lowered. 

From the air behind Lance firms a white dragon head the size of a single-story house. The tips of its mane are frosted blue and its eyes, blue like Lance’s, are as big as tower windows. Lance only comes up to its bottom eyelashes.

Keith’s mouth dries.

Lance retreats a bit more, towards the dragon. The head lowers further till Lance is 

grabbing handfuls of the rough, snowy hair that hoops its massive head. Keith was so fixated on the face that he did not even notice the body. He does now, as Lance hops onto its head like he’s mounting a horse, sets himself right between its pointed black horns. Keith’s alarm catapults his heart into his stomach, and he’d be running forward if not for Allura’s strong hand around his bicep.

Its body is as white as its face, a thick planet of gathered hail. Keith’s eyes follow it, follow  _ Lance _ , as it straightens up. There is so much to track—the incredible trunks of its forelimbs as it rests its two front feet against the grass and folds its hind-legs under itself, a move so strangely benign and canine-like that Keith can feel some laughter swimming in his chest at the absurdity, the impossibility of it all. The slight scaling of its white hide, the slight cobalt of its underbelly. If Keith had to guess, it is the size of about half of the Arusian palace, the whole of the Feyivi base.

It is magnificent. 

And the most incredible sight of all: Lance on its head, sitting straightforward with his feet above its brows. Keith has never seen a more regal sight. Lance’s transformed tattoos wind and wrap around the tufts of the dragon’s mane, two anchor points.

The dragon turns its head from side to side, like it’s stretching its neck. Keith feels himself trying to leap forward again, panic-swamped, but Allura holds onto him (by the  _ gods  _ she’s fucking strong). 

Yet when the dragon sets its huge blue eyes on him, they are warm, almost… familiar? Its nostrils twitch and Keith feels the warm wind of its amused huff pass through his hair. Is it… laughing at him?

Keith turns to Allura. He somehow finds the words to wheeze out,

“How is this possible?”

“It is a soul dragon. There were those of the pure-mix Belí hundreds of years ago, those with incredible control over their use of ether, who could manifest dragon avatars. Though Lance’s avatar seems to have grown several meters since our practice yesterday.”

“So the dragon…?” Keith starts, floored with absolute awe. He watches the soul dragon’s chest move with its breathing. 

“Is an extension of his soul. He sees whatever his avatar sees, and vice versa.”

“Does it have a name?”

Allura beams again. “Darú, the ancient faery word for blue.”

Keith swallows. This is still Lance. Just an unbelievably majestic, significantly scalier version of him. 

When Keith goes to step forward this time, Allura does not stop him. Keith approaches, steps measured, his heart in his throat. It occurs to him that this dragon is likely modelled after the ice dragons of Lance’s maternal home. This makes Keith’s chest ache. The dragon’s glinting blue eyes grow more amused as he gets closer, the work of its pure white lashes fascinating as it blinks almost lazily. Then Keith is there, under the awning of its pointed chin. The dragon is inconceivably larger like this, with Keith as big as one of its claws.

The dragon rears back a bit and lowers its head. Keith digs his nails into his palms to keep himself steady, his stomach cocktailed with exhilaration and awe and a healthy dose of fear. 

But when the head lowers so that Keith is eye to eye with the avatar, so that he can look up and make out Lance’s lovely human face at this shorter distance, he feels himself settling. Darú huffs again, its warm breath shrouding Keith. Keith’s mouth twitches towards a smile. Something compels him to raise a hand towards the tip of its nose. Darú tilts its head towards him. Keith cautiously sets his hand against the spot between its nostrils and finds it to be perfectly solid, as warm to the touch as a roused stovetop. A warmth you would seek in the dead of winter. 

When Keith looks up towards Darú’s mane, he finds Lance grinning down at him.

Keith notices Allura approaching out of the corner of his eye. She gives a reflective hum, then,

“Aha! I think I know what’s caused this surge in power.” She is quiet for a moment, mind working. To break the silence, Lance taunts,

“Do we have to wind you up like a holiday toy to get the rest?”

“No,” Allura responds, still thoughtful. “But it seems that Keith will have to wind you up as often, and as vigorously, as he can.”

That is when something truly incredible happens. Keith has the incomparable pleasure of watching shameless Lance flush in broad daylight. His own choking at Allura’s comment is well worth it.

“Lura!” Lance calls down. 

“It’s the faery blood, Lance! I believe that your magical stores have received an incredible boost in power from your recent deflowering.”

“That term’s a bit too delicate for it,” Keith’s saying before he can stop himself. Lance looks like he wants to feed him to his soul dragon.

“Allura, how do you even  _ know _ —” Lance is spluttering. 

“Was it supposed to be a secret? From what Ezor tells me, you were far too loud for privacy to have been any sort of intention.”

“ _ Gods— _ ”

“Also, do not be ashamed of your heritage, Lance. I’ve brought entirely new rivers into existence on the mornings after I’ve—”

“Allura,  _ please _ .”

↡

After Lance and Keith finish their bath that night, Lance rushes out into the bedroom before Keith. When Keith emerges from the washroom, he finds that Lance is nowhere in sight. Keith had not heard the door close. A game, then. Keith rolls his eyes and tamps down his grin.

“Find me!” Lance says. His voice comes from the nook beside the large chestnut wardrobe, right across the room.

“What do I get if I do?” Keith asks.

“Me. In whatever position you have in mind.”

“I’ll have that anyway,” Keith says, slowly approaching the nook. The lamplight doesn’t quite reach this part of the room, but Keith catches a glimpse of the mint green robe Lance had been wearing the first night. His cock begins to firm at the memory of how lovely Lance had looked, how much like a little seductress. Keith feels a bit like he’s on a hunt, Lance his pretty quarry. 

“So sure of yourself! What if I leave?”

Keith reaches the nook. Lance is tucked in sideways. He’s resting his temple against the short wall, lips newly glossed as he licks them with a sweet pink tongue. A portrait of sultry repose. Keith finds Lance’s hip in the near-dark, circles the point of it with his thumb through the gauzy film of Lance’s robe. 

“You won’t,” Keith says. 

The words are confident, but his tone brooks a question. Keith drinks in the adorable dip of Lance’s dimples as he smiles one of those achingly, beautifully sincere smiles—an answer. Keith urges Lance against him with a tug of his hips. His love’s arms loop around his neck, and Keith brings him into a soft kiss. It is Lance who opens it, who parts his lips and offers up his warm mouth, who grinds his hard cock against Keith’s with so much unadulterated ardor that the friction is soon unbearable, that Keith feels his mind caving to a hot, hungry haze. He bites Lance’s bottom lip somewhat less gently than he’d intended, and before he can mutter out his apology Lance is moaning his approval into his mouth, arms tighter around Keith’s neck. Keith’s pulse sears in his veins at the thought that he may have found himself a gorgeous little masochist.

“Besides,” Keith adds in a mutter against his lips, “I’m helping you train your magical stores.”

“A peerless coach, truly,” Lance replies, pulling him back into the kiss.

He glides his palms across Lance’s hips, trails them further and further back until he reaches the base of Lance’s spine. This is where the arc of his plump, incredible ass begins, and Keith feels out his warm skin through the thin fabric as he pillages Lance’s greedy mouth. He runs fingers along the furrow of Lance’s spine, where he expects to find the slightest ridge of Lance’s waistband. But he finds nothing. He breathes raggedly at the discovery that this flimsy covering is all Lance is wearing, and at the fact that Lance has begun to plant honeyed, curious kisses along the edge of Keith’s jaw, embarking on an expedition that will surely turn Keith into a vicious, rapacious thing. Keith interrupts Lance’s exploration as he grips his hips again and pushes him back to set a few more inches between them. Keith holds him steady as he surveys the beautiful man before him, from the sulky pout that makes Keith want to bite his lip again to his bare collarbones, flanked by the rumpled panels of his robe. Then lower, to where the tie still holds across his stomach, then even lower to the spot between his thighs. 

No trousers. 

Keith swallows. He can see the form of Lance’s stiff member through the gossamer fabric, material gone translucent where it sticks to the tip of Lance’s cock. There is something so dirty about the fact of Lance  _ half-dressed _ and rumpled already (well on his way to being ruined), something  _ indecent _ . And this is all before Lance, somehow already a shameless little tart on this, his second official day of a non-virginal existence, peers up at Keith from under his lashes and grabs himself through the pale wet green of his garment,

“Look what you did to me. And all while I’m still wearing clothes. How could you?”

“This,” Keith replies, tugging Lance against him once more by the knot of his robe, “hardly counts as clothing.”

“At any rate, you seem quite enamored with it—  _ fuck _ ...”

Keith has returned his attention to Lance’s lower back only to sink rough hands further to his primary target. He takes up two generous handfuls of Lance’s ass. Lance tucks his head against Keith’s neck as Keith toys with the rounded flesh under his palms. Keith taps the underside of the cheeks, right where thigh and rear meet, to feel them bounce under his direction. Lance pants softly against his neck. Keith readjusts so that the fit of Lance’s head against his neck is more snug. Keith shudders as he feels lips working at the skin of his throat. Like this, he can peer over Lance’s houlder, down the line of his back, to where his robe drapes over the delectable swell. Keith pulls the cheeks apart, then pushes them back together, guides Lance back into the rolling grind they’d established earlier. The fabric catches in the cleft between cheeks, and Keith is treated to an even more explicit view of Lance’s shape. Lance squirms and moans louder at the handling.

“You’re the one traipsing pantless through my room,” Keith accuses fondly. 

“Wh… which will not be a one time occurrence.” Keith thinks Lance means it as a challenge, but his voice is far too breathy for it to register as such. Keith turns his face and grins into his hair.

Keith grips Lance’s ass more purposefully now.

“Up,” he murmurs as he lifts. Lance immediately takes his meaning. 

With a single graceful hop, he’s wrapping his legs around Keith’s waist. They’re kissing again as Keith turns towards the bed, mouths urgent.

Keith remembers what it feels like to carry Lance, can’t believe he’s lucky enough to experience it in such an improved context.

Keith drops down onto his back and helps Lance into a straddle. They pull away for breath as Lance settles in his lap. The robe is just barely hanging on, the entirety of Lance’s torso bare. It will remain just like this if Keith can help it.

Lance leans over to the bedside table with a look of unmitigated glee in his dark, hungry eyes. He has the stoppered vial in hand now, head tilted thoughtfully. And Keith  _ knows _ he is not prepared for whatever exists on the opposite side of that look. 

Lance begins to hike his robe up further along his thighs, and Keith says,

“I feel like I’ve corrupted you.”

Lance laughs. His hands fall to the ties of his robe as he gives Keith an innocent look. He undoes the tie, robe parting to reveal his nipples, his stomach, the jut of his cock. Brandishing the vial in his hand, he asks,

“Do you not wish to corrupt me some more?”

Lance helps Keith open up his little hole. 

Keith sits up and pulls Lance in till they’re chest to chest, till the rounded tips of Lance’s nipples are dragging against him. Keith’s breath hitches whenever their nipples catch. He’s never been very sensitive there but Lance  _ is _ , and the way that he wriggles and groans and deepens the arch of his back whenever it happens sets Keith alight.

Lance’s robe is bunched up above his hips, held out of the way in Keith’s fist as Keith fucks two slippery fingers into his hole. Lance slips in a finger of his own, right beside Keith’s, and together they work to stretch Lance as he mewls prettily right into Keith’s ear. Unsatisfied with the pace they’ve taken, Lance adds an over-eager second finger. Keith warns him to be careful, and Lance returns to one. When Lance does it again, Keith removes Lance’s fingers completely with his unoccupied hand. Lance whines pathetically as Keith holds his wrists together against his heaving chest.

“Th… that it, Keith?” Lance pants. “Nobody can touch me inside except for you? N-not even,  _ ngh _ , not even me? Am I all yours Keith?” 

Keith leans forward for a vicious, bruising kiss as he plunges his fingers in deep, to the very last knuckle. 

“ _ Yes _ ,” Keith rumbles against Lance’s kiss-swollen lips. 

Lance shakes and comes with a single sharp intake of breath (like he’s  _ shocked  _ by the force of it), stains Keith’s trousers where he’s still wearing his sleep pants (Keith’s own fault, truly). 

Keith has every intention of allowing Lance some time to recover, of allowing his wet, softening cock to rouse back to hardness before he pushes inside. 

But Lance is having none of that.

Lance pulls Keith’s waistband down with quick, nimble fingers. He wraps those slender fingers around the thick shaft of Keith’s cock. Keith is a weak man. His hand falls away from Lance’s entrance as Lance crawls up his body a bit. Lance raises up onto his knees and brings the bright red tip of Keith’s pulsing cock to his oiled opening. With his lips parted in concentration, Lance begins to lower himself. The mushroom head pops just inside his oiled rim, and Keith bites his lip at the grip. Lance’s brows knit and his stomach tenses as he drops down a couple more inches and the stretch becomes too much. Keith’s hands fly to his hips. Together, they work Lance open further and further, till he’s wholly split on Keith’s cock. And Keith is completely enveloped in this tight, otherworldly heat. He takes a few steadying breaths. 

Lance’s smile is so bright, so genuine. Just at the wide split of Keith’s cock in him.

Oh Keith has  _ definitely  _ corrupted him.

“Take your time,” Keith tells him. 

Keith lays back down on the bed, careful not to jostle Lance too much. Keith offers his hands and Lance takes them, uses them as leverage as he lifts himself a bit. Then he eases back down, thighs flexing as he re-takes the seat he’s made for himself in Keith’s lap.

He undulates his hips just a bit, and he and Keith moan in unison. Lance’s eyes widen, a look of muted wonder on his face. 

“It… I didn’t even know you could get any deeper…” Lance breathes.

He raises up a few more inches, then drops back down again, fingers tightening around Keith’s.

For several more thrusts, Keith grits his teeth against the terrible urge he has to fuck back. Lance just looks so adorable like this, hair charmingly disheveled, brows raising as he shocks himself with the pleasure he’s taking.

But when he’s finally gotten the hang of things? When he’s bouncing in Keith’s lap, on Keith’s cock, like the cutest, dirtiest being Keith’s ever seen? With his member slapping down against Keith’s stomach with every re-entry, curls jouncing hypnotically? When Keith can see where his own veined cock emerges then disappears inside the tight confines of his pretty love? The once-wrinkled pucker of his gorgeous rim pulled smooth and slick by oil and Keith’s precum?

Keith responds in kind.

He pulls his knees up and braces his feet against the bed. The next time Lance drops down, he fucks up.

“Fuck!” Lance shouts, voice cracking. And it’s all the more arousing because Keith can sense, by the broken way he yell emerges, that Lance was actually trying to be quieter this time around. 

How precious.

Keith smirks. 

↡

The hours and days are contracting.

Ryan trains with them now. He is an air elemental whose skills with his own air blades are so formidable that it is nothing for him to transfer those abilities to regular swords. Ryan spars with Shiro, more often than not, and Keith’s chest packs with warmth at the sight of his brother so happy.

↡

The day before they are to depart, Lance leads Keith underground. They pass the forge that Allura had brought him to, and Lance brings him down a stone corridor. Daylight flocks in from the skylight just above the passage, and Keith’s breath catches at the sight of the walls.

The murals are unbelievable, yards and yards of various depictions of a great white dragon arcing through blue sky, alighting on the sides of lush green mountains. On the section of wall just a couple of feet ahead of Keith, there is a woman. Lance approaches the image, and Keith follows.

The woman is beautiful, with skin darker than Lance’s and curly hair the white of harvested salt. She kneels in the grass with her legs folded under her, a book in her hand. She is mid-eye roll, like someone near her has just done something absurd. Her eyes, turned skyward, are the same light blue of Lance’s. Though she’s kneeling, her depiction is much larger than either Lance or Keith. The crown of her head nearly brushes the top of the wall.

“This is her,” Lance says, voice soft.

Keith pulls Lance against his side, and they’re quiet for a while.

↡

They depart a week later.

They are sixty in total, dressed in the Arusian layman’s garb that a tireless group of coalition members have been able to replicate. They take the tunnels, but with their much larger company this time around, and the sections of scored earth that Oriel must fix from their encounter with the water elementals on their way to the hollow, it will be slower going. Dangerous though the tunnels are, they are the quickest possible route.

The fire-bugs return, and Keith feels a comfort in their strange pincers, their familiarity. 

They are about six hours in when they stop. They’ve met with blockages before, waited till Oriel, Lance, and the other earth elementals sent them deeper into the ground to clear the way, mounds of rock lowering like unrolled tapestries. 

But when Oriel and Lance pause this time, Keith watches their faces tighten with concern. He glances at Shiro, Ryan, and Nadia where they, too, are monitoring their companions’ reactions. There are rustles and whispering in the crowd behind them as the members of the Arusian force attempt to see what the trouble is.

Lance bids his fire-bug closer to the stoppage. Lance gasps, so low that Keith would not have been able to hear it if he wasn’t so close.

“Soft marble!” Lance shouts. “Elven ice!”

A trap.

There is the resounding rasp of multiple swords unsheathing, and Oriel turns back to yell,

“Above! Below!” 

Keith recognizes the signal, the alert they’d developed in case they were presented with a trap like this. He widens his stance and braces himself.

The ground beneath them begins to rumble. Keith can make out the form of several earth elementals beside him as they crouch down. They set their hands to the rock underfoot, and the slab of earth begins to ascend with the entire company atop it. As the stone rises, the wall of soft marble melts. The tunnel fills with the raucous slosh of freed water, the sudden wave breaking against the growing stone column in wet commotion. Keith grits his teeth against the urge he has to reach out for Lance, for Shiro. He must trust them. So as the water soaks through to his skin, as it rises to his stomach and Keith thinks of Lance, crouched down, holding his breath as he helps expedite their escape, of Shiro in the untouched dark somewhere, he holds. 

They’re rapidly approaching the tunnel ceiling now. Lance and all of the other earth elementals pop up, hair glued to their foreheads, chests heaving as they reclaim their breaths. They raise their arms, close enough to the roof now to make direct contact with the rock there. The fire-bugs whir around them, nick the darkness at random like wobbling suns in a shaken nighttime sky. Lance’s face is alight with focus and Keith’s hand is tight around the hilt of his sword. Adrenaline is rolling fast and piquant through every single one of his limbs and he has never been more in love.

A fire-bug flits past Keith’s temple. He notices the flash of a purple robe and turns. Over the edge of the brand new shelf of rock, he spots a keen face, eyes as gold as war medallions. The ears are large and pointed, and there is nothing but hostility in the expression. An elf.

The elf lunges for Keith’s ankle. Keith turns slightly, a bit blinded by the dark water, brings his blade down hard on the wrist of the hand that grabs him. There is a pained, outraged gurgle-shout, the fire-bug beside him comes close enough for Keith to notice blood staining the water red. Then, there is a much louder sound, like several simultaneous cannon shots. Keith looks up in time to watch chunks of grey ceiling rock explode from their stillness as the earth elementals blow the roof apart. Above them, the day looks new.

They rush from the makeshift platform of stone. They have only a few seconds to catalogue the sparse trees around them, to fully register their surroundings. And what a term to use, Keith thinks sarcastically, since they are surrounded by almost one hundred elves.

The coalition's company falls into its own ringed formation, their backs to each other so that they can look out at the enemy. 

Keith cannot help but think that, if the circumstances were even a  _ bit  _ less murder-y, he’d be nursing a boy-like wonder. Elves! They are nowhere near as reclusive as the forest spirits or the dragons, but that is not to say that they’re too fond of coming into Arus. And Keith has certainly never seen one in person.

Well, now he’s seeing them. Of various skin tones and heights, draped in indigo or purple with what look to be scythes and rapiers in their hands.

The elves rush in.

Lance has found his way to a spot beside Keith, a black bow in hand. Lance notches a single onyx arrow, and Keith’s breath catches as he realizes that these are another iteration of Lance’s tattoos.

The first elf that comes for Keith is only half a head taller, scythe a menacing half-moon. Keith throws up his blade to block their blow, arm vibrating with the force of the hit. The elf pulls its beautiful face into a wicked sneer. It is hardly sportsmanlike, but Keith kicks the elf in the stomach beneath the cross that their scraping blades make. No sooner has his foot connected with its target does he see multiple taller eleves, each closer to seven feet, leap over their heads to land in the circle of their ring formation. 

“The formation is broken!” Shiro shouts. “Re-group!”

Keith takes full advantage of the compromised balance of the elf in front of him. As they’re straightening up, Keith drives his sword into their stomach. Their eyes widen, and he leans into his adrenaline to lessen the sickening emotional weight of what he’s doing. He shoves the sword up, the elf spits blood, and Keith wrenches his blade free. 

Lance is right behind him. Keith knows it by the breathing, by the whoosh of rapid arrows whizzing through the air. Up ahead, there are two elves bounding towards Keith. 

“I have your back,” Lance tells him.

“And I yours,” Keith says.

A few meters away, Shiro and Ryan are also back to back. Ryan, air blade in hand, winks at Keith. 

The fighting lasts for far too long. Keith feels his limbs burning with a dangerous exhaustion. Any delayed reflex could cost him his head, his life. But they are outnumbered. An elf’s rapier catches him down the side of his cheek, and the sight in his left eye fills with the red of his own blood. But the blow costs the elf more than it cost Keith—before Keith can slice the elf’s throat across with his glade, a black arrow pierces through the side of its neck. Lance calls the arrow back to his bow, makes it pull out and arc back to him as the elf’s slack body collapses. Keith allows himself exactly one second to be absolutely amazed, then ducks and rolls out of the way of an incoming scythe. 

“We need a diversion,” Shiro pants from beside him. 

“Shit,” Lance curses, pulling an arrow free of an elf’s chest. It sounds like he’s realized something. Then, once more with feeling,

“ _ Shit _ .”

“Shiro! Oriel!” Lance calls. 

Lance calls for something named the spearing maneuver, and Shiro orders them to resume their original battle formation. Keith can tell by the hesitance in Lance’s voice and hard set of Oriel’s jaw that they were hoping it would not come to this. 

Fighting off the elves long enough to recover their ringed formation is not easy. But they do manage it, haggard and bloody.

The earth elementals crouch down again. 

“Now!” Oriel shouts. A wall of brown earth erupts before Keith. His latest elf opponent clangs their sword against it. The earth wall domes overhead. The blue sky disappears from view, as does the elf that has attempted to leap into the wide circle at the center of their formation. They are wrapped in darkness once more, the curses and shouts of the elves outside muffled.

Then, they are moving.

Keith braces himself against the newly-constructed partition as the enclosure glides away. There is a jerky bump and the splitting of what sounds like a great tree. Keith recognizes the frenetic turns as attempts at avoiding as many trees as possible. Keith thinks he knows why Lance and Oriel had been so reluctant to use this maneuver—the destruction that they will leave in their wake will be something to behold. The noises of the elven company taper off until they are gone entirely, and Keith lets out a breath.

↡

They cover so much more ground in the earth enclosure than they would have otherwise. Even so, they must eventually dismantle the pod. They dry their clothes as much as they can over small fires livened by the scant few fire elementals in their company. They proceed the rest of the journey on foot, mercifully unbothered.

By the time they cross the border into Feyiv two days later, their worn clothes allow them to seamlessly blend into the town. Their group evenly distributes itself across the multiple boats set to depart for the day.

Keith is taken by a leaden sadness at the sight of his people, bowed and tired from fighting that has nothing to do with them. Shiro gives him a supportive pat on the shoulder, and Lance finds his hand in the late-afternoon din.

↡

They retire to an inn for their first night in Arus. It is a different one from the boarding house Keith and Lance had used during their escape from the capital, and the relatively softer bed is a welcome comfort after the cots of the civilian-class cabin on the river boat, but the circularity of events is perplexing all the same.

Even before they’d left Allura’s hollow, everyone agreed that Ryan would be the one to do it. Keith has seen his air blades at work, in practice and during their bout with the elves, but it is Keith’s understanding that Ryan is able to generate air blades as small and fine as long acupuncture needles.

All he will need is an opening. 

The action unit huddles in Lance and Keith’s room. Oriel lays on their bed and hangs his head off the edge in a rather juvenile gesture. Ryan flicks his nose, childish in his own rite. Shiro lounges in the one free chair near the window, wearing a smile that does not make it past the bottom half of his face. Keith knows that this is likely all the worse for his brother because Shiro, like the rest of the unit, only found out that Ryan would be the assassin the day before they’d left. Allura had wanted to keep it as quiet as possible in order to avoid any possible leaks. She, like Lance, is too shrewd to trust easily.

Lance turns to Keith with a considering expression. They’ve both opted to sit on the ground.

“What?” Keith asks, lips already curving towards a smile.

“Just thinking about what we’ll do to mask your face tomorrow. It’s far too aristocratic, too…  _ chiseled _ . You look like you took your first steps at a joust.”

“This one too,” Ryan agrees, reaching up to pat Shiro’s cheek. Shiro’s smile burns more genuine. “Though I suppose the beard does help. Humans have no sense of object permanence. Grow out a bit of scruff and they’re re-introducing themselves to you.”

“No sense of style either,” Nadia notes, fiddling with the place setting on the table in the corner. “You clean bird shit with artificial flowers. You don’t set them out for decoration.” 

The light mood does not last. What seems like far too soon, they’re waking up on the other side of the day, readying themselves for their mission.

Lance and Ryan find worn gloves at the nearby market to hide the tattoos on the backs of their hands, and Oriel wraps himself in a thin cloak to cover his. The rest of the Arusian force stations themselves near the palace as beggars and pedestrians. They will help secure the palace if the action unit is successful. If not, they will retreat to Ekrim.

Keith is seized by a crush of sickening nostalgia as they approach the palace, as he spots the towards and balustrades. The crowd is much thinner than Keith had been expecting, and it seems that the black-armored guards are turning people away. 

“What’s going on?” the woman ahead of them asks one of the guards.

“Don’t you remember, ma’am?” the guard asks, respectful tone at odds with the menace of his armor. “Today is the first Feral Fancy in seventy years.”

Keith does not know why, after all that has happened, the memory comes to him so swiftly. But he suddenly has the most vivid recall of drawn contortionists and jesters, arms painted, flouncing around on the pamphlet he’d read to distract himself from his Calculus lesson with Lance all those moons ago.

Beside him, Lance’s face is a facsimile of the cold, unreadable expression he’d worn in Arus. If Keith was not so used to him now, if Keith had not seen that lovely face laugh and pout and prize into a hundred different expressions, Keith would think that this chilly look was all there was.

Ryan’s look is a bit more readable. His eyes narrow, jaw tight. Shiro rests a calming hand on his bicep. Nadia looks like she’d like to split something down the middle with an axe.

“No entry today,” the guard tells the woman. “Sorry madam.”

Lance’s eyes are roving, searching for something. Keith tracks their path across the street, to an ale house about a quarter mile away. It is on a busy street corner, and a gaudy, lacquered carriage of red and gold is parked right outside of it. On the side of the carriage, there is a purple-haired woman diving through a giant gilded hoop. Lance’s gaze meets Keith’s, and Ketih can feel the same idea budding in both their minds. But Keith finds his skin itching at the thought. 

“Really?” Keith murmurs.

“It’s a chance,” Lance says, voice perfectly neutral.

Lance gets the attention of the rest of the unit, inclines his head towards the ale house. Keith does not think they know, in detail, what Lance has in mind, but Ryan’s eyes are narrowing further in suspicion.

They slough off from the small crowd, their pace measured as they approach the ale house. Keith keeps his head down as much as he can without looking like he’s about to do what he’s about to do. In the softest voice he can manage, Lance explains the idea. 

Soon, they’re at the carriage. Keith spots a few women and men through the window of the ale-house, their clothing flimsy, the “tattoos” on their arms streaking already.

“Gods,” Nadia murmurs at the sight of them. “Sweat a  _ little less  _ if you’re trying to pull this shit off.”

The carriage is empty. For a moment, the driver’s seat is empty too, horses shaking out their manes in a move that reminds Keith of Darú. 

Then, a burly man with a graying beard is rounding the carriage, climbing up into the seat behind the horses. Lance begins to step forth as soon as he’s seated, but Keith stops him with a hand on his shoulder. Lance turns his head to look at him and pats Keith’s hand where it rests. His blue eyes turn stark white for a brief moment, then return to their previous blue. Keith barely has enough time to feel the sense of compulsion that Lance’s thrall brings with it, the urge to do whatever Lance asks. Keith gets the sense that Lance has spared him on purpose, given him the briefest glimpse out of respect.

“I have this,” Lance tells him.

Lance steps up to the carriage seat and looks up at the man.

“Sir?” Lance calls. The man looks down, expression already annoyed. It thaws a bit at sight of Lance’s face. Lance is wearing a broad smile that would have any hot-blooded creature leveraging their wealth to woo him. Keith is filled with the strangest, most ironically possessive sense of pride. 

Keith wonders if Lance really even needs the compulsion.

There is a slight glaze that overtakes the man’s expression as he makes eye contact with Lance. The vacancy in his eyes is relatively easy to miss if you’re not paying close enough attention. But the unit is very focused on the exchange at hand, and Keith hears their small gasps as they spot the driver’s stupefied look. 

“Yes, love?” the driver answers.

“You can leave for the day. The palace is right there. Our company can handle the bit of travel that remains.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” the driver agrees, giving Lance a smile of his own. 

“And while you’re at it,” Lance adds as he holds eye contact, “would you mind forgetting what you’re doing here for the next day or so?”

The driver nods, enthusiastic, as he descends from his seat. The exchange is as fascinating as it is unsettling. 

Oriel takes the reins as the rest of the unit slips inside. Nadia, Ryan, and Lance will play the part of the Belí impersonators while Keith and Shiro act as their assistants.

They find stacks of costumes inside the roomy carriage, though combined, the compiled material of the clothing could likely make two winter tunics.

Ryan’s face darkens at the sight of the clothes, at the sight of the rainbow streamers that the dancers often use.

“Absolutely not,” Ryan says. “This is demeaning.”

Lance sets down the pair of shorts, little longer than undergarments, that he’d been assessing. He walks up and sets a hand against Ryan’s cheek, turns his head so that their eyes can meet.

“I know,” Lance says. “There is nothing I can say that will change this. But what stands between you and the reality where you can burn these clothes is a dead despot.”

Ryan takes a steadying breath.

They find some face paint in a lacquered box, and Nadia takes a moment to paint Keith and Shiro’s faces beyond recognition. At the end of it, their cheeks white, they both look like they belong in a playing card deck. 

The Belí are all dressed some moments later, Nadia in a dress that looks like something has attempted to maul it off of her, Ryan in a pair of loose-fitting pants and a short, shirtless vest, and Lance in an ensemble that does not attempt even a modicum of modesty, the shorts that he’d been considering from before and a shrunken tunic that barely reaches his belly-button. They find a number of veils that cover the bottom half of their faces, and they wear those as well. The veil is likely a safer bet for Lance, whose face is likely recognizable at the palace, but the unity is less suspicious.

Keith bangs twice on the wall to alert Oriel that they’re ready. Then, they’re off.

↡

“Halt!”

Oriel brings the carriage to a stop. Outside the window, Keith can see a bit of the elaborate wrought iron gates.

“Aren’t you all a bit early?” 

“Is over-eagerness met with punishment in the capital? Forgive me, I’m from a Krellian settlement.”

“Watch yourself, imp—”

“Let them through, Erik,” another guard interrupts. “The quicker they finish in there, the 

quicker we get to see them out here. Fuck knows I need a good laugh.”

A few beats later, the gate is creaking open. Across the carriage, Lance watches him over the edge of his light blue veil. They ride down the long cobblestone path in silence.

When they stop again, it is Oriel who hits his side of the wall twice. 

When they emerge from the carriage and onto the lawn, Keith schools his face into a neutral expression. 

There is a woman bounding up to them immediately, barefoot with red hair to her waist. The smile she wears suggests that she is about to take them on a tour of an estate available for purchase, not invite them to perform a derogatory performance of Arus’s most reviled neighbor.

“Welcome, welcome!” she chirps. “My name is Bandor, Haggar’s assistant. I will be your escort for today! Follow me.”

They do just that. Shiro and Keith descend with some of the instruments they’ve found, a small guitar and a lyre. Their swords are unyielding where they’re tucked against their bodies, under their clothes, so they must walk carefully. Else they will look terribly awkward.

Despite Bandor’s treacly introduction, and despite the supposed merriment that Keith assumes this event is intended to garner, the walls of the castle are barren and depressing. All of his family’s tapestries have been taken down, from the one with the Arusian’s crimson coat of arms, held up by two roaring lions, to the more general floral prints. The walls are a naked gray that sets Keith’s teeth on edge. But he knows that if the change is disturbing for him, it is triply so for Shiro, who has not been home in several months. 

Keith expects Bandor to lead them to the throne room. She’s chattering away so distractedly, about the history of the event and merits of Arus and that one jewelry merchant whose pearl necklaces were actually made of badger teeth that for a moment, Keith thinks that she’s simply lost her way.

She takes two more turns that bring them further into the heart of the castle, then down an unfrequented corridor, and Keith realizes where they’re headed.

Melenor’s Eden.

Anger bogs him, and he trips briefly over his own feet. Shiro catches him, gives him a reassuring look that, thankfully, penetrates through the absurd make-up.

“At first, we were going to hold the opening dance in the throne room, but Haggar had the brilliant idea of holding it in Melenor’s Eden instead! Queen Melenor was something to behold! Such righteous anger against the Belí savages. Ah!” Bandor brings her hands to her chest, expression turned fanciful. “How poetic! To take up the Feral Fancy in the tract dedicated to her. She would be so proud.”

Barbed shame lobs in Keith’s stomach like rolled chicken wire. Yes, she likely would be proud.

“And heeere we are!” Bandor announces. 

She presents the heavy wooden door with a flourish, and the armoured guards stationed here step out of her way. She unlocks the door and pulls the bar across with a surprising amount of strength. When the door opens, Keith nearly bites his tongue in his attempt to keep his face unmoving. Bandor bows out as they enter, flits back down the hallway to do gods know what.

There are the orange blossom trees, wringing white flowers from sunshine fruit. As beautiful as the last time Keith saw them, like someone has been taking care of them.

At the end of the garden, Haggar sits on a long bench, flanked by a woman and man dressed in the same brown robes she wears. There are two more armoured guards on either side of her bench. Haggar’s young face is luminous. Keith wants to spit.

The action unit walks up as close as they dare, careful to avoid suspicion. They are still too far away. Ryan’s acupuncture needles are close range weapons. For maximum effectiveness, they’ll have to be fired from about six meters away. When they halt, they make sure that Ryan is at the front.

Haggar smiles, something serene but sharp. 

“Oh, this is a lovely treat,” she says. She tilts her head. “Lance, was it?”

Keith’s heart beats hard inside his chest, and he fights to stay calm. He can see that the other members of his unit are doing the same. Haggar continues.

“Nice veil. Though that dreadful scar under your arm is quite distinct.”

Lance’s arm twists just a bit as he turns it to shield one of his long scars from view. Lance has never shown signs of shame at his scars in Keith’s presence, and Keith has done all he can to build a dynamic where all Lance feels is comfort. 

But Keith can tell by the twitch of Lance’s brow that with this simple observation, Haggar has gotten to him.

“So then that would make you Keith,” Haggar notes. Her smile grows. 

“And you Shiro.” Her smile holds firm.

Keith and Shiro pull their swords free just as five guards surround their group, sword tips pointed towards them. 

“Oh, what a gift. What an  _ absolute  _ gift.”

“I think your hair is long enough to serve as your own hanging rope,” Lance says. “How efficient.”

Haggar laughs. “I get the feeling that you all did not intend to execute me in full popular view. My death was meant to be underhanded, no? The Belitian brand.”

“What has a barefoot child-killer to teach me about wartime etiquette?”

Keith senses movement beside him, looks down to see Ryan stirring up the air with two fingers. 

“Stop that,” one of the guards growls, sword digging into the skin of Ryan’s throat.

“You’re no fun,” Ryan deflects.

Haggar rises from her perch and approaches them.

“Lance,” she draws out his name. She sidles up to the guard who holds a sword to his neck. “In demeanor, you are nothing like my brother described you. Your face is the exact same though, tattoos too. It wasn't that difficult to put two and two together when you arrived at the capital. The boy he described was so sweet. Weak before, well...” Haggar’s grin grows, sharper.

Lance’s eyes narrow as he considers something. Then, they widen in realization. 

Keith does not know, in detail, what Haggar is referring to, but he feels his protective anger flaring up all the same. He takes an involuntary step towards her, but his guard stops him.

“Yes,” Haggar notes, her face thoughtful. “Vladimir was quite useful.”

Keith’s mind is whirring. Vladimir. The man with the dirty fingernails. The Naxzelen Ivy. His parents. There is no possible way that Haggar had been able to orchestrate all of this so perfectly. No way. This would have required such extensive planning, such… ruthless calculation. Keith’s throat fills with bile. 

Ryan still needs an opening. He is their only chance, and Haggar is close enough now. 

Keith’s grip tightens around the hilt of his sword. Before him, the black of the guard’s helmet seems bottomless. Luxite. Cybelian crystal. Which is stronger?

His next move is reckless to its core.

He ducks out of the way of the guard that holds their sword to him, leaps sideways towards the guard that holds Ryan hostage. He channels all of the force that he can into the swing of his sword as he arcs it towards the guard’s stomach.

The blow is disorienting enough that the guard before Ryan stumbles back a bit.

For far too long, everything is a blur.

Swords ring out in the courtyard, under the trees his mother loved like children, under the bedroom of the Arusian monarchs, his parents. Keith blocks and returns a guard's sword swing with such force that it knocks back their visor. If Keith were using any other weapon, the gap in defense would be completely useless to him. 

But with Lance’s crystal ether sword? With the saber that seems to move to the ebb of his thoughts?

It is all he needs.

He drives the point of his sword into a widened, exposed eye, stumbles back with the 

guard and blocks out the sound of his terrible wail. When the guard falls, Keith does not hesitate. He throws all of his weight behind the sword, and the body stops moving.

Keith turns, his back firmly to the courtyard wall in order to avoid any surprise attacks, just in time to see it.

Ryan raises his hand, air swirling and sharpening over his fingertips. Then, he aims for Haggar’s exposed throat and loosens them.

They hit her point blank, and she clutches at her bleeding neck as her eyes widen, shocked. She falls to the ground, and Ryan releases two more needles, straight at her chest. Her brown red blooms red, and she slumps over.

Shiro seems to have figured out the same eye trick. Another one of the guards lays supine on the ground, visor lifted and eye punctured. But there are still two more luxite sword-wielding guards, and Haggar’s two companions have picked up the weapons of the fallen sentries. 

Lance, dipping out of the reach of a guard’s luxite sword, looks at Keith. Keith recognizes the resolve, even if he might not know exactly what Lance intends. 

“Cover me!” Lance calls, and it is the work of a moment for Keith to bolt to his side. 

There is a guard coming straight towards them. Keith braces himself for a fight, senses an incredible surge of power from behind him. Before the guard can bring their sword down, a single giant white claw emerges from somewhere behind him. It drives through the approaching guard’s stomach, tears through their luxite armor like it’s paper. 

A ways away, everyone, both friend and foe, is watching with their mouth wide open.

The claw is long enough to cover the short distance that separates Keith and Lance from the remaining adversaries. The claw flicks them back with a single fluid movement, sends them crashing into the stone wall on the other side of the garden. 

“A monstrosity!” pants the brown-robed woman from before. It seems that she has used the very last of her strength to shout it, blood slatting down her chin, one of her legs bent at a horrifying angle. Keith hears the sound of more guards just outside the garden door, more than they could ever hope to fight off themselves.

“No,” Lance says from behind Keith. Keith turns. Lance’s hair is whipping around his head, just as it had on that day at Allura’s hollow.

“I am something worse.”

For a moment, Keith has no clue why the ground is moving. The floor beneath him turns to white, shaggy down. 

Darú. 

Shiro has sweat through most of his face paint, but his shocked face is just as pale as the lost pigment. Ryan’s eyes are huge, Oriel’s smirk is proud, and Nadia looks three seconds away from asking Lance to let her steer the dragon. 

And they haven’t even seen the body yet.

The guards outside of the door are louder now.

“Come on!” Lance calls as Darú’s head continues to lift. 

Everyone scrambles on just in time, fists clenched tight around tufts of Darú’s mane. They’re at least fifteen meters off of the ground now. The garden door bursts open, and more black-armored guards flood in.

Then they’re rising and rising and rising as Darú’s neck lengthens. The guards are as small as one of Keith’s hands now. Keith thinks some of them have pushed back their visors, absolutely thunderstruck. 

Darú completes its formation as they launch off into the sky, torso and limbs forming as they bound towards bright blue. Keith’s stomach threatens to fall out of his body, and he’s tempted to bury his face in the shaggy mane. They are in the company of the clouds now, huge leathery wings beating loud behind them, their bodies pressed tight against the dragon. Below, the palace is the size of a palm, then it is a speck, then it is nothing. Oriel screams from somewhere beside him as they take flight, a peel of exhilaration. It is exactly how Keith feels, though his throat cannot seem to find the noise.

Keith knows he will return. But right now, he senses that there is something still left for them to do.

They head towards Ekrim.

↡

What could have ever prepared Keith for seeing Lance like this? On the head of a fucking  _ dragon _ , tattoos wrapped around thick locks of its hair, steering it like it is second nature.

When Keith has somewhat settled, when his stomach has returned to its original orientation, he chances a glance backwards. The dragon’s wingspan is the breadth of about half an acre if Keith had to guess, wings themselves an untouched, glacial white. 

Keith cannot believe how quickly they reach Ekrim. One moment he is tending to a terrified elation, staring (though this may be a generous word for it; Keith must keep his eyes to a measured squint or risk them burning) out at infinite blue. The next, they are gradually losing altitude, and Keith’s torso feels hollow once more. A few more downward sweeps like that, and Keith can see the tips of trees poking through the sky like green thimbles. Keith looks for the Feyivi base before he realizes, with a start, that they’ve long since streaked past it.

A cobalt spire comes into view just a few feet below Darú. As they get closer, the rest of the picture emerges: a sprawling palatial estate, with rooftops so sharp a blue they look unreal. The walls of the buildings themselves are a chalky white, and as Darú descends Keith can make out several water gardens, serene enclosed spaces dotted with lush greenery, calm ponds at the very center of them.

Darú slows as the Ekrimian palace comes into larger view, and it almost feels like the dragon is shrinking. The wingspan reduces in size, then the loud whip of its tail against the air lessens in volume. 

There is something else that Keith notices. Outside the palace gates, there is a crowd. They look angry, farming tools and swords and spears in their hands, and they look to be dressed in the regular clothes of commoners. 

“Hold on!” Lance shouts.

Then the descent is quicker, Darú compressing and compressing until Keith  _ swears  _ that it’s only a head.

They hit the ground right behind the crowd. Hard. If Keith had not rolled into his landing at the last moment, he would have definitely broken a shoulder.

“Apologies,” Lance winces as they groan. “Still a novice I suppose.”

Lance is the first of them to rise, loping towards the crowd like they had not just slapped into brown earth like some spoiled child’s unsatisfactory ragdolls. 

Keith collects himself enough to rise as well. He helps Shiro up, and soon they’re all pursuing Lance. 

Lance has somehow managed to part the angry crowd of Belitian commoners. When Keith is able to squeeze through, he finds Lance speaking to an impassioned middle aged man with a hoe in his hand. Some other members of the crowd are arguing with the guards.

“You can’t keep them here!” someone shouts.

“Give us our children!” another yells.

“I’ll eat my arm well-seasoned before I ever fight for you pompous louts!” someone cries. 

“What’s happened?” Keith asks Lance.

Lance turns to him, eye shimmering with excitement. It’s like they’re still in the air.

“This,” Lance replies, before he turns towards the palace gates and launches Darú’s claw. The guards duck out of the way just in time.

Darú’s claw slices right through the wrought iron like scissors through twine. The crowd streams in, Lance at their helm. 

↡

The Ekrimian guards are overwhelmed by mob force.

As it turns out, swords are entirely useless when a crowd runs you down before they can be drawn. Keith has never seen anything like it before, the swift unbuttoning of stored anger. An uprising at its rawest. 

They catch the Ekrimian monarchs at lunch in one of the main water gardens. There is a braised pheasant on a bronze platter, a miniature waterfall in the far corner of the garden, and two aged sovereigns tracking the entry of their irate subjects with utter disdain. 

Their eyes alight on Lance, and their expressions shift from disdain to unvarnished bitterness. The looks are so sharp that Keith feels the sudden impulse to shield Lance from them.

But Lance stands tall beside the man he’d been speaking to earlier. 

“I would give anything to not see Alfor in you,” Queen Luka spits. 

“It is nice to see you too, grandmother. You look remarkably well for someone held together by prune paste and hallucinogens.”

“Our ruin has returned,” King Malcidus notes. “And look at how he speaks to us!”

“I will trouble you with this conversation no longer than I must,” Lance replies, deadly calm. “You will abdicate your throne. You will end this farce of a rule. You will let your people breathe.”

“And if we do not?” Queen Luka sneers. 

A couple more members of the mob step up, spears and blades in hand. 

“Then I cannot help you,” Lance says. 

↡

What follows is the most exhausting month of Keith’s life. 

Romelle is finally free to return to the mainland with their aunt, uncle, and cousins. Keith bounds towards her in the middle of the palace lawn, accidentally tackling her into the fountain. He cries harder than he has in a while, too relieved to stop it.

Forget about the harrowing dangers associated with winning back a country. It is statesmanship that might very well do him in. 

But they finally have the chance to put their parents to rest, to hold a proper memorial. They’re buried in the royal tombs in the east near Holtstone. Lance is in attendance, winds his arm around Keith as the priest blesses the tombs in the name of the death god Aktia.

He, somehow, finds the time to repair Shiro’s watch, and it feels a little bit like healing.

His primary solace is that he and Lance, who is the interim Ekrimian leader after the abdication and exile of his family members, are of the same mind when it comes to the ruling structures of their respective countries: maybe consolidating power in the hands of temperamental dynasties  _ isn’t  _ the best way of doing things? Shiro is enthusiastic in his support of a move to something less autocratic. And Romelle is a tremendous help, takes to diplomacy just as well as Keith always suspected that she would. 

But  _ fuck  _ if it isn’t hard. 

Bad blood between Arusians and Ekrimian is ever-present. Marmoran loyalists protest in the streets of the capital nearly every day, absolutely tireless. The elves send the very first emissary they’ve ever sent to Arus in all of Keith’s twenty-two years, an eight foot tall man who is so charmingly kind that Keith almost trusts him. Romelle calls it out for what it is, when the siblings discuss current events over their private dinner that night: an attempt to curry favor after one of their countrymen almost drowned Keith in an underground pool. 

And worst of all, Keith does not see Lance anywhere as frequently as he used to. They’re both so busy running their own nations that they can really only manage visits once every two weeks. He had grown so accustomed to Lance’s proximity, to the soothing impression of him nearby, that whenever Keith wakes up in his own bed to find that he is alone in it, he cannot get back to sleep.

Whenever they do meet, Keith takes Lance with a ferocity that leaves his love stumbling around like a baby colt for the first couple hours of the morning that follows. 

Keith has been struck with several embroidered pillows for chuckling. 

A break comes though, an extended weekend where Keith has no meetings, no sycophants to test his patience, no political responsibility whatsoever.  _ Of course  _ he will spend it at the Ekrimian palace with Lance.

Keith leaves the capital so fast he’s sure the chair in his study is still spinning on a single wooden leg.

When Keith arrives at the Ekrimian palace a little past dusk two days later, after he’s washed up to make himself presentable, he finds Lance in his room, finishing up a letter at his desk.

Keith strides over to the table with intent, but Lance raises a hand to stop him. Lance doesn’t even look up from his letter, a corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.

“I think you’re doing holiday incorrectly,” Keith notes.

Lance’s smile widens. “Am I?”

Lance is shirtless, the curve of his shoulders unobstructed and inviting. Keith walks over as Lance continues to scribble away with his pen. Keith stands right behind him, the back of Lance’s head centimeters away from where Keith is stiffening in his trousers. With a low hum, Keith considers the lovely, flowy cursive on parchment. From the few words that Keith can make out, it seems to be something or other about wheat tariffs. Nowhere near the most invigorating thing Lance could be doing right now, in Keith’s opinion. 

Keith reaches out and runs a hand through Lance’s soft curls, something soothing and rhythmic.

“You’re under the impression that you’re being particularly sly, aren’t you?” Lance murmurs.

“Just trying to relax you,” Keith replies, tone innocent.

“I’ll be relaxed when I finish.”

“Yes, you certainly will.”

“Keith.”

Keith tightens his grip just a bit in Lance’s hair and tips his head back. It had been the discovery of a lifetime, finding out that Lance likes his gorgeous hair pulled. There’s so much of it too. Keith can always get a phenomenal grip.

Lance blinks up at him with his head tilted back, lips parting the smallest bit. Keith runs a thumb along the appealing red plump of Lance’s bottom lip, and Lance’s mouth opens as if on instinct. Even after all this time, the angelic gleam of those big blue eyes in this context still makes Keith feel like the filthiest fucker on the planet.

“Just one round?” Keith requests, thumb dipping into Lance’s mouth. “Then you’ll be free to play the sexless statesman.”

“Can I get that in notarized writing? So I can bring it up when you have my knees by my ears for the fourth time tonight?”

Keith chuckles as he spins Lance’s chair around. He helps Lance to his feet, hands penning the curve of his waist as he pulls Lance into the first kiss they’ve shared in far too long. Keith does not understand it, how his home has suddenly been halved: his siblings over in Arus, Lance here. Every brush of Lance’s lips against his feels like a return.

They start off gently. Keith is desperately hungry for Lance, absolutely ravenous with it, but there will be time (plenty of time) to attend to those appetites. Keith sets Lance on his back in the sheets and opens him up slow, the trickle of oil deliberate and unhurried over the curve of his balls, over his furled, pretty pucker, down the valley between his rounded cheeks. Keith is not pushed to rush the stretching, no matter how convincingly Lance whimpers and gasps and begs him too. As it turns out, Lance  _ is _ a little masochist (they’ve even developed a stop-word). Likes it when it burns a little, when his eyes tear up from the force and slightly too-sudden charge of Keith in him. And Lance  _ must _ be opened thoroughly, every time, because Lance’s ass is the tightest thing Keith has ever pushed his cock into. Every one of their trysts somehow feels like Keith is breaching him anew, hungry rim split wide around the thick of Keith’s member. 

When Keith hilts this time, Lance staring up at him with his lip between his teeth, Lance’s legs wrapped around his waist, he truly does not understand how he ever finds the strength to leave the snug, furnace-hot grip of the most beautiful creature he’s ever laid eyes on. 

“Y… you made me too wet,” Lance pouts.

“Oh? Can you not feel me?” Keith teases. He pulls out about halfway and shoves back in, fucks a pretty gasp right of Lance’s mouth.

“Don’t like it when you go too easy on me,” Lance teases back. 

Keith raises a brow. “Yeah?” 

He unhooks Lance’s legs from around his waist and slings them over his shoulder, takes full advantage of the chance to sink in even deeper. Keith braces his hands on either side of Lance’s head, rears back, then thrusts in with a full-bodied, wet  _ clap  _ of sound, his thighs hitting Lance’s plump, proffered cheeks.

“ _ Yes! _ ” Lance moans.

Lance doesn’t even break a sweat at being folded in half, far too flexible for it to matter, and Keith finds himself tipping over into the very particular, very addictive brand of hazed lust that comes with the knowledge that Lance  _ wants _ Keith to bend him, to double him over, to hold him at unique, erotic angles and fuck into his eager, jiggling ass. 

Keith rucks the sheets as he pumps into Lance, his baby’s brown legs in a jolted sway just past the hard line of Keith’s shoulders as he adopts a measured, rough-thrust pace. Whenever Keith hits Lance’s sweet spot, Keith grips his chin and holds Lance’s head steady so that he can’t tip it back. So that Keith has an unfettered look at the roll of Lance’s eyes into his skull, at the helpless batting of long lashes as Lance’s eyes flitter closed.

Lance’s lips are parted in a soft red  _ o _ , and Lance is letting out the most obscene, unintelligible sounds. Keith leans down for a messy kiss as he shortens his thrusts. He adopts a grind on every deep inward press that has Lance’s legs trembling against his shoulders. 

“Am I being mean enough to you yet?” Keith asks against his lips. 

Lance nods jerkily. He lets out a wrecked whimper as Keith rolls into his sweet spot.

“S-so merciless,” Lance agrees at the end of a ragged pant. “But you can go harder, can’t you Keith? So that I can’t— _ fuck _ —sothatIcan’t even take a single step tomorrow without remembering you, so big inside me? Or didn’t you miss me at all  _ ah— _ !”

Keith feels wholly overtaken by Lance’s words, the seize and spasm of his hot hole, the fanning of his wet lashes as Keith fucks him towards overwhelmed tears.

Keith pulls out, earns himself a devastated whimper from Lance.

“Keith! Give it back—”

Keith holds Lance spread open by the backs of his knees as he descends, wrapping his lips around Lance’s pretty cock. It only takes three purposeful bobs, and a swirl of his tongue around the leaking tip, to have Lance emptying into his mouth with a shout. Keith swallows the salty taste without a shred of hesitation, then proceeds lower, pushing Lance’s legs to his chest.

Keith licks his lips at the sight of the pretty, puffy-rimmed opening of his ass, moistened with Keith’s precum and the oil they’d used. Keith’s cock pulses between his legs as he takes in the picture before him, the stretch of Lance’s smooth stomach, his lovely inked thighs. Takes a moment to fully absorb the truth of this bronzed, summery beauty in the sheets below him.

Then he leans down like a man starved, tongue tracing Lance’s rim.

“Oh! K… Keith…”

Keith will never get over how shy Lance gets when he does this to him. Lance’s grip tightens in his hair, and he rests a single curled finger against his bottom lip, one of his only signals of genuine bashfulness.

Keith lands a kiss to a rounded cheek, right beside Lance’s entrance.

“Of course I missed you,” Keith tells him, kisses crawling ever closer to Keith’s objective. “Missed the barbed comments, the conversation, that pretty face.”

Keith eases his tongue inside Lance, the enticing warmth he’d just been fucking into. Keith’s voice lowers as he speaks again.

“And I missed my flower.” 

“ _ Mmmfuck _ .”

Keith will never be able to ravish Lance as deeply with his tongue as he does with his cock, but gods if he doesn’t try. He laps inside his pretty love, chases the combined taste of them. He establishes a pattern where every dirty slurp of his tongue into Lance’s ass is followed by a sweeter drag of his tongue around Lance’s rim. He intersperses gentle kisses, caresses so tender they’d be the stuff of fairy tales if he pressed any of them to Lance’s upper mouth.

And if Lance’s legs were shaking  _ before _ ?

Now, they tremble in the air above him, wind in nonsense patterns. Lance babbles when he’s like this, filthy things that make Keith slurp at him rougher, that make Keith want to fuck his mouth the first chance they get after this round.

“Y-you should have this whenever you want. You should have  _ me _ — _ fuck _ —anywhere you want.”

And,

“‘S good, ‘so so good... are you trying to  _ eat _ me Keith?”

“Am eating you,” Keith shoots back before he dips back down. Lance jolts at the response, grip tightening in Keith’s hair. 

“‘S yours,” Lance slurs. “Y-your hole, yours. Do what you want to it. Kiss it, fuck it, ruin it, spend it inside it  _ ohgods _ —“

Keith slips two fingers into Lance’s saliva-slick opening, scissors them apart and slips his tongue in.

Lance loses all of his speech to gorgeous, garbled moans. 

Lance’s toes curl, something that has always just  _ done it _ for Keith, and Keith feels a heavier, hotter weight dropping down into his stomach, urging him towards a shared finish. Lance almost comes again, but Keith wraps a tight hand around the base of his cock before he can. Lance looks up at Keith like this is the utmost betrayal.

Keith flips Lance onto his stomach, draws his fleshy cheeks apart, and re-enters in a single fluid shove, makes Lance shout with the abruptness. Keith plants his hands on either side of Lance’s head and rams him like that, Lance’s cheek pressed to the sheets. Their moans meld together as Keith presses inside, full spheres of trembling flesh bouncing with every slam. Keith knows they’re both hedging climax, has long since reached a point where he can identify Lance’s impending peak by the way his moans pitch, breathy, then taper off into choked silence. 

Keith winds a hand into Lance’s hair and tugs his hair back so that Lance is blinking up at him again, like before at the table. Keith straightens up a bit and straddles Lance’s thighs, eases Lance into the filthy arch of a horny contortionist. Keith uses a fistful of Lance’s curls to fuck into him wildly, skin smacking moist and so so noisy. Keith wraps his other hand around Lance’s curved throat, keeps Lance’s pretty, bleary eyes in view as he fucks him. 

“Give me your mouth,” Keith tells him through a jagged pant, nearly a growl.

Lance parts his full lips, and Keith ducks in for a kiss, sloppy and shallow and filthy because of the angle but  _ oh so good _ . 

Lance squeezes tight around Keith as he convulses, and Keith swallows his scream as his pretty love spends into the sheets below them. Keith is not at all far behind, and comes with a shout that scrapes his throat raw.

Keith makes his collapse into the sheets as intentional as possible so that he doesn’t crush Lance, falls to the side. He remains sheathed (because he knows that Lance is a sick fuck who enjoys it) as he pulls Lance against him so they’re chest to back. For several long moments, they do nothing but catch their breaths. Keith kisses his shoulder.

“You just fucked me like the world is ending,” Lance notes.

“I may have been a bit… enthusiastic.”

“Novice athletes are enthusiastic. You are a fiend.”

“Oh? See if I ever give you what you want again.”

Keith hears the amusement in Lance’s voice as he says, 

“You will.”

Lance pulls himself free of Keith’s arms, sighs quietly, a bit sadly, as Keith slips out of him. 

He snuggles up to Keith once more, head pitched back a bit to face him.

“We’re allies now,” Lance concedes, “but I feel like I have the upper hand.”

And with the delightful fall of Lance’s hair over his forehead, with the curves of his dimples on stark display, with his mouth rosy and eyes happy, Keith is inclined to agree. Keith hugs him closer.

“Yes, you do.” 


End file.
